


In The End, She Appears

by cuddliestcactus



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, BAMF Darcy Lewis, Banshee Powers, Female Friendship, Original Character Death(s), Slow Burn, Supernatural - Freeform, Supernatural Darcy Lewis, Will Be Going Through Marvel Movies, banshee - Freeform, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-02-26 18:57:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 72,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2662769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddliestcactus/pseuds/cuddliestcactus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You a screamer, Lewis?" Clint tried to leer at her, but it came off a little more drunk puppy than Rico Suave.</p><p>"Trust me, no one likes it when I scream." </p><p>Darcy wished she was kidding.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Or the one where Darcy's a banshee</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Darcy-centric story, and the biggest part of it will be her journey. It's a Darcy/Bucky story as they will be the main couple, but romance won't be the driving plot because that's not the only thing Darcy has going on in her life. This will be about all of the things Darcy goes through, including her figuring out her powers, her friendships, who or what she is, and where she fits in this world. You know, just girly things :)
> 
> This story will have deaths. If it is a major character, I will 100% warn you ahead of time because that's polite. If you are at all sensitive to heart disease related deaths or fire related deaths, this is your warning.

Darcy couldn’t stop crying, wailing really. Diane Lewis was pretty sure the last time Darcy had been this hysterical was the ill fated 3rd birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, but that had been years ago. Her daughter was 9 now and while, yes, she could be dramatic at times, the drama was always a means to an end. That end being whatever Darcy had put her mind to that day.

But that was her daughter. Strong-willed and smart as a whip. Darcy’s independence and tenacity were why this situation was so worrying to Diane. The young girl’s sobbing had woken Diane out of a dead sleep from all the way down the hall. By the time she had gotten to her room, Darcy had graduated to full blown howls.

Diane had rocked her little girl, hugged her to her chest, and spoken steadily into her ear, but nothing she did calmed Darcy down. She wasn’t proud to admit it, but after 20 minutes of unsuccessful consoling, Diane had had to leave the room because Darcy’s voice was starting to give her the strangest headache… like her head was vibrating and her eyesight was going dark. She had left to get some water, maybe some Advil, with every intention of coming right back to her distressed child, but as she was getting a cup in the kitchen, the house became silent.

Diane turned to find Darcy, cheeks red and glistening, in the doorway.

“Honey,” Diane went to kneel in front of Darcy, cup forgotten on the counter, “Are you alright?”

Diane was so close that she could see Darcy’s pupils narrow as they focused on her. Darcy took a small breath and let out words so soft that Diane had to ask her to repeat herself.

“Grandma’s gone, Mama.”

“Grandma? What do you mean?”

Darcy’s shoulders curled inward and she hung her head to duck her mother’s gaze. “Grandma. She…” another shuddering inhale rocked her small frame, “Her arm hurt. She was going to sleep and her arm started to hurt and then her chest was burning and then… then we weren’t in her room anymore.”

Tears had started to slide down her face again, so Diane wrapped her in her arms. “Oh, honey, it was just a bad dream. Grandma’s fine. It’s okay, shh,” she whispered to her daughter as she picked her up and headed back to bed.

Diane could feel the neck of her sleep shirt growing damp where Darcy was hiding her face. “No, Mama, Grandma’s gone, she’s gone…” 

Darcy’s whimpers began to die out as exhaustion took over the child. Diane laid down on her own bed and cuddled Darcy to her chest.

They slept until a phone call roused Diane. She left Darcy asleep and hugging a pillow to pick up the ringing phone on her desk.

It was the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. Her mother had died in the night. Heart attack, they said.

Diane couldn’t remember what she told the police officer on the phone. All she could remember was staring at Darcy’s sleeping face and remembering her words from the night before.

_“Her arm hurt. She was going to sleep and her arm started to hurt and then her chest was burning and then… then we weren’t in her room anymore.”_

\----------------------------------------- 

Darcy and her mother didn’t talk about that night. Not really. Diane had just told Darcy to never tell anyone about her dream. Her mother had looked so scared that Darcy hadn’t even corrected her.

It hadn’t been a dream because she’d been awake the whole time.

But Darcy didn’t tell her mother that. She didn’t tell Mama about how Grandma had been moaning and clutching at her chest, restlessly writhing in her bed, until she saw Darcy. She didn’t tell Mama that Grandma had only stilled when Darcy had climbed onto the bed and tried to give her a hug. She didn’t tell Mama that Grandma had only smiled at Darcy when the hug went right through her like Darcy’s arms were made of clouds. Darcy definitely didn’t tell Mama about how she could only touch Grandma when they weren’t in Grandma’s room anymore.

It was almost like they were outside, but there was no ground or sky or light. Just shadows that danced in the corner of your eye, but melted away when you looked right at them.

It should have been scary. Darcy thought it would have been if Grandma hadn’t been there. She didn’t say anything to her granddaughter, but only knelt to give Darcy a hug that normally would have been warm and soft. This hug was cold and hard, but no less comforting.

Some part of Darcy knew that she wouldn’t see her Grandma again. Knew that she was going away to a place that Darcy couldn’t go. Darcy just knew it without knowing why, like when she knew that stray dog was scared and going to bite her when she found it in an alley after school. Darcy had just had to look into the dog’s eyes and then she understood. This time there were no eyes to look into, but her body knew it just the same: Grandma was leaving.

Grandma let go of Darcy and smoothed one wrinkled hand over her cheek. Darcy closed her eyes as she felt her Grandma’s lips kiss her forehead, but was distracted by a frozen sensation creeping up her legs. She didn’t have time to open her eyes before Grandma’s lips were gone and the ice had swallowed her.

The next thing she knew, she was screaming in her bed.

Darcy sometimes thought that her mom had made herself forget about that night. She wasn’t mad about that, not really, because even at her young age, she knew that what had happened wasn’t normal.

She had gone to her grandmother’s funeral, and had wondered why so many of these people wept over the wooden box over the altar. Didn’t they know that wasn’t where Grandma was? Her mama had explained that Grandma’s body was in there, but that wasn’t her.

As she watched more and more people spill tears on the wood or press kissed fingertips to the oak or lay down roses, she realized that they didn’t know. Darcy did, but it was like when she knew Grandma was leaving or when she knew the dog would bite her. Darcy could feel Grandma in that other place. It wasn’t like the man in the black robes had talked about when he had spoken about Grandma being here in her mom and in Darcy herself or in the special cookies they would make with her recipe at Christmas. 

If Darcy concentrated hard enough, she could feel Grandma as well as she could feel the grooves in the rail under her hands or the tear in the velvet cushion of the pew under her legs.

Looking around at all of the other people dressed in black and burying their faces in handkerchiefs, Darcy knew this wasn’t normal.

\---------------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy tried to figure out what had happened and had decided it had to be that something was wrong with her.

To be honest, she didn’t look any different than everyone else. She didn’t know what she had expected, though. It’s not like she was going to find that she had sprouted tiny antennas or a sudden tail. She’s pretty sure she would have noticed that right off the bat.

Physically, she was a totally normal child. She had dreaded going to her first annual check up after Grandma’s funeral, fully convinced that the doctor was going to take one look at her and know something was wrong. To her relief and surprise, she had received a perfect bill of health from him.

There was a small dash of disappointment, too, because she had no concrete clue as to what was happening with her.

She could still feel her Grandma when she tried. It was nice because even though she couldn’t reach her grandmother in any tangible way, it still meant that she was out there somewhere. Darcy just let that be the end of it for a while. Puberty was hard enough without extra things making her stand out. The Early Onset of Extreme Boobage at 12 had been traumatic enough, thank you very much. 

She had contended with spelling bees and friends to play Hogwarts with and the end of elementary school and then middle school and acne and school dances and what did you do with curly hair and crushes on boys and before she knew it, she was in highschool. All without another Unexplainable Incident.

It’s not like that night with her Grandmother ever truly left her, but she had a life to live. That feeling was always there, in the back of her mind, but she pushed it aside for the most part. She didn’t understand it so what was the point?

Ignoring it worked for a time. 

Until it didn’t.

The highschool in Darcy’s small hometown had a Carnival Fundraiser every year on Halloween that should have been lame to teenagers, but had the advantage of being a decades old tradition. The whole town came out for the event. There were ‘spooky’ hay rides, caramel apples, giant turkey legs, rigged games, and most importantly, a Haunted House.

The Haunted House was legendary because it was always run by the senior class and each grade went all out to top the year before. In 1997, the vice principal had peed his pants in the clown room and that had become the benchmark upon which all other Houses were judged.

Darcy had never really cared for the Haunted House because it was hard to be frightened of wax and red corn syrup when you’re real life resembled a big budget horror film, but she always ended up going through it with her friends. Her junior year was no different. She had been talking to a senior named Matt who was in Debate Club with her, and he had not stopped going on about the room in which he was working. Darcy figured she could fake a swoon into his arms or something.

She was too busy thinking about Matt’s arms to notice the creeping cold up her back. By the time they had reached the second floor of the house, a creepy asylum, she was shivering so hard her teeth were cracking together. She was about to comment on the temperature when she noticed her friends were actually sweating and taking off their jackets. It was only then that she saw, in the corner of her eyes, a black mass swirling to enshroud the only light source in the room: an industrial lamp filled with red bulbs to give off an eery glow. Darcy screamed as the whole room was covered in darkness.

\-------------------------------------------------- 

Her friends told the police that the first thing that had happened was Darcy screaming. The room went dark as Darcy wailed. They said they all saw an explosion and smelt something burning. They had run out of the house, but had had to drag an out of it Darcy with them. They told police that once they were outside, they had realized that it had to have just been a trick of the house and were trying to calm down Darcy so they could all go back inside when it happened.

There was a bright burst of orange light from one of the windows to the basement and then an eruption of fire. The whole house had been evacuated and the fire department called.

The police interviewed witnesses as the firemen did their best to put out the fire. They made their way through the crowd systematically to ensure they talked to everyone who had been in the house. The rest of the visitors all reported that they heard a scream from somewhere inside the home, but thought nothing of it since it was a Haunted House. They all couldn’t have known that the rooms had been sound proofed with layers upon layers of foam and fabric so that each room could be it’s own experience and no sounds should have reached beyond a room’s four walls. Roughly ten minutes after that one scream, the basement went up in flames.

The officer interviewing Darcy’s group said that they were suffering from shock because it was impossible for them to have experienced the explosion before it happened. He couldn’t explain how the whole house had heard Darcy screaming, but the police had bigger matters at hand than to try and make sense of what was, in their minds, panicked babblings of people who had just gone through scarring events.

Darcy had remained quiet. No one found that strange and assumed it was just her method of dealing with the trauma of being on the fringe of such a violent display. They weren’t wrong about it being her coping method, but they were wrong about which trauma. 

Because Darcy knew that the tragedy here was not the ruin of the historic, old home, but rather the body the department was about to find near the ignition site. Maybe Darcy should have spoken up, but they would find him anyway. If she did tell them, they would want to know how she knew there was someone down there. And she couldn’t tell them the truth.

The truth was that as soon as that shadow had put out the lights, she had seen the boy going down the steps to the basement where supplies were kept to get more fake blood. She knew, with the same instincts as before, that this boy was going to go to that same place her Grandma had gone. This boy was going to die.

He couldn’t see her like her grandmother had, but she knew it was because she was watching something that hadn’t yet happened. It wasn’t far enough in advance for her to have been able to stop it. This boy was marked and there was nothing she could do to change that. She watched him heave a heavy bucket full of liquid into his arms and saw the wires behind him spark. Saw that same spark land on forgotten propane tanks hidden under piles of props. Saw the fire engulf the boy before he knew what was happening. Saw him burn.

By the time she had come back into herself, she was screeching an unnatural melody and her friends were staring blankly behind her. She turned and saw a window to the scene she had just left, could feel the warmth of fire and smell the…

Darcy had enough presence of mind to turn away from the cop taking their statement before she emptied the contents of her stomach. The officer looked at her with pity as one of her friends held her hair back. He was called away by an anxious looking colleague where they had a hushed conversation before grimly stalking over to the now smoldering house.

Darcy didn’t look back. She knew what they would find.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so much longer than I expected. Real life is stressfull and all of that, but most of my life has settled down for now so the next updates will be more timely!
> 
> Secondly, THANK YOU! The response the first chapter got was overwhelming and amazing. It has me so pumped for this story, y'all don't even know

In hindsight, googling ‘I see dead people’ had been a mistake.

But what was she supposed to do? She was a child of the information age. The default for anyone in her generation was to google the unknown. Darcy had learned to exercise some caution in the wake of looking up ‘blow job’ in the 5th grade after hearing some older boys say it at the movie theater, but the principle remained the same.

Once she had waded through the approximately 4,000 Sixth Sense memes, Darcy realized that the internet was going to fail her.

She had been keeping to her room since that night three days ago. The town had been abuzz all weekend, and the one time she had braved Facebook, she had nearly hyperventilated with the bombardment of grieving statuses and pictures of roaring flames. School had been cancelled today, but Darcy didn’t know how she was going to go back.

Was she just supposed to go take her chemistry test tomorrow? Focus on the laws of thermodynamics and work out the standard free energy of this equation or that? Go through the motions, face a cafeteria full of clamoring teenagers who would all only be talking about the carnival?

She couldn’t do that, couldn’t just go on like the world outside was the same one she had always walked through. It might look the same, but she knew better now. She could feel it when she closed her eyes as though she were a kid swimming underwater, unable to see, but still sensing something lurking in the deep.

Getting up from her desk, Darcy began to pace. Her skin felt too tight like it was moments from splitting along her bones. She’d been on edge for three days straight, and she recognized that she was about to hit her breaking point.

Letting her bedroom wall meet her back and sliding down because she was too exhausted to stay on her feet, she focused on breathing through her nose so the scream trying to claw up her throat wouldn’t make it passed her closed mouth.

That was the most exhausting thing.

She kept having to stop herself from screaming. 

\----------------------------------------------------

Her mother found her in the same spot hours later.

Diane had been cautiously letting Darcy get away with shutting herself off for the weekend. She told herself that was a normal reaction to trauma, and her daughter was merely processing a grievous but explainable tragedy.

The older woman consciously ignored the small voice in the back of her head, the one dripping in guilt, whispering about the last tragedy she and her daughter had shared.

The sight of Darcy huddled against the wall, clutching her head as she bit her lips together so forcefully that Diane expected blood to drip down at any moment, dispelled any hope that she had been harboring for the teenager to be alright.

‘It could still be just the shock of death,’ Diane thought to herself, ‘It doesn’t have to mean…’

Diane couldn’t finish the thought, wouldn’t finish it.

Shaking her head of things better left in the past, she moved across the room, coming to kneel at Darcy’s side.

“Sweetheart?” Diane tucked her daughter’s hair out of the way so she could see her face.

Darcy didn’t say anything, but she did crumble into her mother’s arms. Diane sagged with the unexpected weight, but just sat down and let the fully grown teenager curl up in her lap like she was still the little girl who liked to cuddle up to her mom on cold nights.

She rocked her girl soothingly and cooed into her hair until Darcy finally stopped trembling. She snuffled into her mom’s shoulder, and Diane rested against her head as she asked “Do you want to talk about it? You know I’m here to talk about whatever you want.”

Darcy didn’t say anything for the breadth of a heart beat before letting out a dry sigh. 

“No, you aren’t.”

Diane pulled back, confused. “What do you mean?”

Darcy kept her eyes trained on the cross that hung around her mother’s neck. It had been her grandmother’s who had given it to her mother a few years before Darcy had been born when Diane had been having a rough time.

Diane had always been driven. Her father had died when she was young, and though her family had never wanted for money thanks to a slew of factories up the east coast, Diane had always admired her own mother for raising her on her own. Her mother hadn’t remarried which was a bit of a scandal at the time, but the Lewis’ had always marched to their own drum.

Diane came out of her childhood wanting to be as strong as her mother, but successful in her own right. She dedicated herself to her schooling and then to her job, worked her way up the corporate ladder, and basked in professional triumph. She didn’t mind that she had never found someone to share her life with because she had friends and had her mother, and was mostly happy. Her life was great with one gaping exception. 

She had always wanted a child of her own.

Someone that she could raise like her mother had raised her; someone to teach how to be strong and how to love; someone to whom she could show this world.

Diane, a woman used to setting her mind to something and achieving it, was met with devastation when the doctors told her she was infertile. Her brains, her money, nothing that had helped her in the past could help her get the one thing out of her reach.

So Diane’s mother had given her the cross that had been a gift from her husband, Diane’s father, in the hope that it might bring comfort. Diane had always told Darcy that praying over the cross is what gave her Darcy. Darcy usually snarked back that science probably had more to do with it even though Diane had never been comfortable talking about whatever treatment she had used to conceive Darcy. 

For which Darcy was exceedingly grateful because she always pictured a scenario with a turkey baster and freaked herself out.

But now as Darcy stared at the cross, she felt nothing more than a spreading numbness.

“I mean that you aren’t really here to talk about whatever I want.”

Diane reached out to lift Darcy’s chin, but Darcy just tucked her head further into her chest.

“Of course I’m here to talk with you! I’m your mother, I love you, and I’m here.”

“Then why do we never talk about the night that Grandma died?”

Diane stiffened, fear and shame trying their best to drown each other out in her chest.

Darcy continued on, oblivious to her mother’s turmoil. “I mean, that’s a pretty weird thing, right? Your kid wakes you up crying and tells you not only that your mom’s dead, but how she died? And we what? Never talked about it except for you telling me to keep quiet about it? What am I supposed to do with that?”

Diane tried to back away, but Darcy’s weight kept her pinned to the ground. She cleared her throat and said “Sweetheart, you… don’t understand.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Darcy’s voice shrilled against Diane’s ears, “I am so aware of that it’s not even funny!”

Diane raised her hands to the side of her head to block out Darcy’s screaming, but it was no use. Darcy’s voice reverberated regardless.

“I keep seeing them! Them being, you know, dead people! Not only seeing them, but feeling them, feeling their, I don’t even know, their energy? Soul? But more than that, I feel their death, Mom. I know it. I know their deaths in a way I can’t even explain. So no, I do not understand…”

As Darcy kept yelling, Diane felt the oddest sense of vertigo. She knew she was still sitting with her hysterical girl in her lap, but she could no longer feel the floor beneath her. There was no more of the late afternoon sunlight shining on them from the window, just blue darkness unendingly spread around them.

Diane could do nothing in her shock, but pull a still screaming Darcy protectively into her chest.

Suddenly, a shaft of light appeared in the darkness like a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, Diane saw window crystallizing out of nothing. “Darcy, shh, Darcy!” Diane put her hand over Darcy’s shrieking mouth. Darcy startled out of her tirade; her eyes widening as she took in the now familiar tableau.

Diane had hoped that her hallucination, it had to be a hallucination, would fade when Darcy stopped yelling, but the twilight held up in the silence.

“Mom?” Darcy whispered from behind her hand, but Diane just clamped down tighter. There was a picture forming in the window in the tunnel.

Darcy turned her head to where her mother’s gaze was arrested just in time for the light in the window to forge the silhouette of two figures. As they watched, the image sharpened to show the figures to be a horned man, red as blood, and Diane herself.

The horned man edged closer to Diane, who they could now see was in her bedroom. The man, so large his horns scraped the vaulted ceiling, laid a hand on Diane’s shoulder and hissed “It’s time,” into her ear, his voice sounding like lightning cracking through a boulder.

It wasn’t the Diane in the picture that spoke next, but the Diane that held Darcy.

“Mephisto…”

Diane and Darcy watched as the Diane in the frame withered and grayed, starting from where Mephisto’s hand clamped her shoulder and radiating out through her body, leaving only a brittle husk. With a low chuckle, Mephisto disappeared from the room as quietly as he had entered.

Darcy stared at the corpse of her mother in that little window, and closed her eyes against the tears she didn’t think she had left.

When she opened her eyes, it was to her own room, bathed in light.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Diane had one hand around Darcy and the other around the cross at her neck.

For a woman who had just witnessed her own death, she felt calm.

Or maybe she was confusing resignation for calm, but she didn’t think that mattered. She had spent years in doubt and paranoia, so there was something almost relieving about knowing exactly what would come out of the choice she had made 17 years before. If that choice had been worth it.

As she gazed down at her beautiful daughter, she thought it had been.

Darcy blinked at the fresh round of tears rolling down her face and reached out a hand to the hardwood beneath them, testing if they were really home.

She pressed her hand into the floor and turned to face Diane.

“Mom?”

Diane gave her a watery but encouraging smile.

Darcy blinked at that and spoke in a deadpan that made Diane proud. “You don’t seem confused. And you knew that… that thing that looked very much like a certain religious character that I am definitely not going to say out loud because it is too crazy. Way, way too crazy.”

Diane laughed at that. ‘Very worth it,’ Diane thought, ‘Anything is worth Darcy.’

“I’m not confused. Rather, I’m not as confused as you. It’s all a little too fantastic to not be somewhat confused, I guess.”

Diane stood up from the ground, her knees creaking and back protesting. Darcy got to her feet with no problems, but that was the way with the young.

Diane led Darcy out of the room with the intention of making them some tea. Warm drinks were always a welcome distraction in the face of serious conversations.

And Diane thought this would be a serious conversation.

Deals with the devil were a fairly serious matter, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who aren't familiar with Mephisto, he is a hell-lord/demon dude in the Marvel comics who bargains favors for souls and likes to present himself as the biblical Satan for kicks because he is a little shit.
> 
> I'm cuddliestcactus on tumblr if you want to come say hi!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning that terminal illness and hospital/hospices are mentioned in this chapter.
> 
> Also weird note about something that I probably won't directly address in the story: I headcanon Darcy as coming from a wealthy family for a couple of reasons. A) The clothes she wears in the movies are extremely high end. B) Literally the only way I can see Darcy being able to afford said designer clothes and just generally afford life expenses for YEARS as an unpaid intern (she says she is unpaid in the second Thor), is that she already has money of some sort. Wealthy family is an easy explanation for that, although certainly not the only one.

Everything was relative, and Darcy was sure that there had to be something worse than having your mother sit you down at your kitchen table to tell you that you were only born because she made a deal with a horned demon named Mephisto.

There had to be.

So she was going to be cool. Calm.

Well, she was going to be that now. When she first heard the news, she mostly got bug eyed and accidentally burned her sensitive areas by dropping a mug of tea in her lap. And then started pacing the kitchen, crotchal region soaked through with Earl Grey, muttering to herself.

But that was then and this was now. She was Darcy Lewis, and she dealt with her shit. 

Plus her feet were tired from pacing.

Diane had been sitting quietly sipping her tea, waiting for the eventuality of her daughter wearing herself out. She was rewarded for her patience when Darcy plopped herself back in her chair. 

Diane handed her a dish towel for her pants, and Darcy accepted with a sheepish “Thanks”, wiping up what she could of the mess.

“So. I have some questions, I think,” Darcy began.

“You wouldn’t be my daughter if you didn’t.”

Darcy smiled, but her brows remained furrowed. “I guess we can start there. I am your daughter, right? Like biologically?”

“Yes.”

“And my father?”

Diane let her eyes focus on a water stain in the table. “I’m not sure. Mephisto said I would have a child. The next day I went to a sperm bank assuming that Mephisto had made me fertile, only to find that I was already pregnant. A few weeks along, they said,” Diane paused for another sip of her tea, swallowing and taking a deep breath before continuing, “Honestly, I didn’t question it. I told people the treatments had just taken a little longer to work. I was just… I was so happy that you were finally there.”

Darcy thought that maybe she should be mad at her mom. Maybe that’s what people were supposed to feel, that anger, when they find out they’re literal hell-spawn. But it was hard to muster up that emotion when she looked at the woman in front of her.

Diane Lewis, pale but still, head bowed but back straight. Clearly scared by how Darcy would take this news, but totally secure in her decision. This the woman who had had no problem bargaining with a terrifying supernatural being just as long as she got Darcy in the end.

It was hard to feel anything but loved.

Darcy wrapped her fingers around her empty mug, playing with the handle.

“Okay. It’s okay, I mean. In case you were worried about that. It’d be a little dumb for me to be upset about this whole thing considering I wouldn’t exist without it, right?” Darcy tried to cajole her mother into looking at her. “So instead of the Science I thought you used to get me, it was Magic. That’s weird, yeah, but not too different. All things considered.”

Diane did look at her for that last sentence. “All things considered?” Diane murmured, “I should remind you that you seem to have acquired unintended side effects from my little negotiation.”

“Yeah,” Darcy winced, “I have. I don’t suppose that Mephisto dude mentioned that when you guys were hammering out the details?”

“No. He didn’t. He said that I would have a healthy child, and I did.” Diane hadn’t thought to add a clause saying that her child should not exhibit any extraordinary abilities. She wasn’t sure that she could fault her past self for the oversight.

It had been her first and only demonic contract, after all.

“Do you think he knew this would happen? Like maybe this is a part of his evil plan? Although I can’t imagine why the devil would need a girl who can feel death. He probably has like a fancy talking mirror for that or those weird tiny devil minions like Hades has in Hercules.”

“No, I don’t think he knew this would happen. I was pretty specific on the wording. Mephisto can’t touch you, so it wouldn’t do him any good to have you powered.”

“Hold up, what?” Darcy stopped fiddling with her mug and scooted her chair closer to her mother, “What do you mean ‘specific on the wording’? Did you actually have a contract? Like that you signed?”

Diane smiled at the confused awe in her daughter’s voice. “Yes, there was an actual contract. I didn’t spend twenty years in a boardroom just to rely on the word of a demon. Apparently contracts are standard in a deal with Mephisto. Mine was very clear. If he comes in contact with you in any way, his claim on my soul is void.”

The reminder of what her mother had traded for her washed over Darcy like the cold mist of that other place earlier. “You really gave your soul for me. He’s going to kill you. Suck the soul out of you, just like we saw…” Darcy gagged on the last of her sentence, suddenly sick.

Diane slid out of her chair to kneel in front of Darcy.

“Yes, honey, he’ll kill me, but not for a long time. Not while you still need me. And no, I didn’t give my soul for you. I would, but that makes everything seem so much more selfless than the ordeal was. In fact, it was selfish. I traded my soul for me. I traded it because I was so desperate to be a mother,” Diane pulled Darcy into her arms, “I knew that my life wouldn’t be complete unless I got to be your mom, Darcy.”

For the second time that day, Darcy was sobbing into the soft skin of her mother’s neck.

“But I’m always going to need you! You can’t just die, there has to be something…” Darcy cried.

“As long as you need me, I’ll be here. I promise. But that won’t be forever. That was my choice that I made a long time ago, and I don’t regret it. I never have and I never will.”

Darcy kept crying.

\-------------------------------------------------------------- 

So sometimes Darcy felt like screaming.

It would be normal for someone in her position to channel her frustrations into a good scream, but she knew this wasn’t the same thing. She had aggressive dance parties in her room to relieve her stress, anyway.

No, this was something else entirely. It started at the base of her spine, a chill from deep within herself, that crawled up her torso and stuck in her throat. It took everything she had to stop the scream that wanted to escape.

Diane noticed. Of course, she noticed when her daughter suddenly clamped her mouth shut, folding her lips so that she could bite them together, abruptly going preternaturally still. She wondered what the kids at school thought of the incidents.

So it was Diane who suggested giving into the urge.

“What? I cannot have heard you correctly, Mother. You did not seriously just suggest I go practice my witchy voodoo.”

Diane had waited until she had her daughter alone in the car and trapped in the confined space with her for an hour while they drove to her mother’s old house. It was located in the country in the middle of a sprawling, wild estate. Diane hadn’t been able to part with her childhood home after her mother died so she kept it as a sort of escape for her and Darcy.

It was close enough to the beach for it to have been a favorite place of her daughter’s as a kid. Diane thought a weekend at the familiar sanctuary was just what the doctor ordered after the last month.

“I think we need to face the elephant in the room, as it may be. We need to understand what exactly it is that you can do, or else you’ll be blind and unprepared. The more we know, the better off you’ll be.” Diane didn’t take her eyes of the road, but she could still see Darcy roll her eyes in the passenger seat. It was hard to miss when she put her whole head and shoulder into it.

“You’re making it sound like this is just some totally harmless thing. Like we discovered I could throw a ball really far, and it’ll just take one training montage set to an 80’s hairband song for me to be in the Major League.”

Diane smacked Darcy’s foot from where she was trying to rest it on the dashboard.

“I am not doing that, I understand that it isn’t a normal situation, but we don’t know anything about your abilities. The issue I have is that it’s only a matter of time until the instinct gets the better of you. You’re going to bite through your lips one of these days, and it won’t be enough to hold it off.”

Darcy tucked her chin into her chest, arms crossed angrily over her chest. “You don’t know that,” she said petulantly.

“I do know that,” Diane sighed, “because I can see that it’s getting worse. Yesterday, you clenched your fists so tightly that your nails cut through the skin of your palm.”

Darcy hunched her shoulders more. “How did you know?”

Diane let her head fall back against the headrest. “Because you bled on the carpet, honey.”

A suspicious sniffle emanated from the passenger seat. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about. But we need to work on this. You can’t go on like you have been.”

“What if I can’t handle it? What if it gets worse?” was Darcy’s watery reply.

Diane smiled. “Darcy Lewis, I taught you better than that. There isn’t anything in this or any world that a Lewis woman can’t handle.”

“Grandma’d be mad I even questioned it, huh?” Darcy laughed, a couple of tears still threatening to drop.

“I think she’d give you a pass, but just this once.”

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy wouldn’t let her mother be with her when she experimented, for lack of a better word. It wasn’t high on Darcy’s wish list to rewatch her own mother’s death, so on the off chance that proximity was important, she told Diane to stay in the house and made her way to the beach.

Her grandmother had built an enclosed gazebo so that she could enjoy the ocean in her old age, and Darcy had long since filled it with hammocks and claimed it as her own. There was a life size cut-out of Spike from _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ in the corner to prove it.

The beach was private property, but that didn’t always stop people from wanting to enjoy it. Darcy and her mom didn’t mind given that they weren’t even here consistently. Luckily, no one wanted to brave the early winter chill so the beach was mercifully empty.

Darcy sat in a hammock and tried to bolster up her courage. She looked at Spike, wished she had sprung for a complimenting Buffy cut-out because she would have been a little better for inspiring bravery, and let out a scream.

Nothing happened.

Well, a pelican got startled off his perch on the roof and fell, but nothing unnatural happened.

Darcy frowned and tried again.

Still nothing.

Like any self respecting human when faced with a conundrum, she called her mother.

“Nothing’s happening!” Darcy exclaimed as soon as she heard Diane pick up.

“Are you doing it right?” Diane asked.

“How would I know? I’m screaming my head off out here and all it’s doing is scaring the wildlife,” Darcy said.

“Maybe you aren’t yelling loud enough,” Diane thoughtfully replied.

“I honestly couldn’t yell any louder, Mom.”

“Maybe it isn’t about the yelling?”

Darcy considered this, but all the incidents had her shouting in some way. Diane had told her that her voice had given her vertigo. It was definitely about the yelling, but maybe that wasn’t the only thing it was about.

“I’m gonna try something. Talk to you later.” Darcy went to shut her Razr, but paused when she heard Diane’s tinny voice saying something else. “Sorry, Mom, what?”

“I was going to say ‘Knock ‘em dead’, but that seemed in poor taste.”

“Mom! Now is not the time for jokes!” Darcy said.

“It’s always the time for jokes. You’ll learn that when you’re old. Good luck, and I love you.”

“I love you despite your terribly timed humor.”

“Pot calling the kettle black, Darcy,” was Diane’s parting shot.

Rolling her eyes, Darcy put the phone away and settled back into her hammock.

She took a deep breathe and thought about where this all began: that night with her grandmother.

She remembered screaming, yes, but she remembered the cold more. A shiver ran through her at the memory, but instead of recoiling from it, she embraced it. She imagined that she was there, in that other place, imagined the dark haze enveloping her body.

The more she focused on the sensation, the more she realized that it wasn’t just cold that she was feeling. It was like when you step into a lake on a hot day, your legs are cool while your torso is hot. Your body is in two different worlds, one known, sticky, burning and the other strange, slippery, cold.

Darcy could feel the here and now: waves crashing softly against the beach, the creak of the wind against the old wood, the smell of salt. But she could feel the other place at the back of her neck, could feel the edge of the cold and sense the incoming dark.

Finally, there was a scream building in her belly.

She let it go, and her world was black.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

Darcy learned. Her mother had been right, as usual. The more she practiced with that other place, the more she discovered. With that gained knowledge, she was in control of her impulses, never overcome with the need to scream.

By the time she graduated high school, Cum Laude despite a rough bout with German and on her way to Culver University, Darcy knew how to go to the other place, spitefully dubbed Mordor’s Scarier Sister or MSS for short.

She never spent much time in MSS because she realized it was incredibly draining to maintain her presence there. The longest she’d lasted was about ten minutes. She’d also determined that it wasn’t just some vision or creepy astral projection, Prue-Halliwell-style, but that she physically went.

Proving that had involved awkwardly filming herself with her mom’s old tripod camera alone in her room, tapes immediately ripped apart, of course.

Over time, she’d realized that while screaming would work most easily, she could get similar results if she hummed in a specific pitch. It took more focus, but was ultimately less conspicuous than shrieking her head off.

A melancholy trip to the hospital during the summer after graduation, with her mom idling the getaway car in the parking lot, proved that proximity wasn’t the only factor that affected visions. It was only the terminal patients that really incurred any reaction within her. She couldn’t truly explain it because it was overpoweringly instinctual, but it was almost as if she could feel the cold more strongly coming from them.

She only saw one of their deaths. She didn’t want to, for her own sake and for the sake of their privacy and their dignity. She was pretty sure what she was doing was already a violation of some sort, but she couldn’t think of any other way to test her ability.

For most of the patients, she just knew which were closest to death. There was one towards the end of the hall, an elderly man she could see through a cracked door, sleeping in his bed. She couldn’t tear her eyes away. The thought that he was going to die within the hour suddenly registered, and she knew it with the same certainty that she knew the sky outside was blue.

Unknowingly, she had begun humming in that one low pitch, couldn’t have stopped it if she had forced her fist in her mouth. She wasn’t focused enough to fully get dragged to MSS, but it didn’t matter. She could still see what would happen, it was just hazy like she was looking through cheesecloth.

The man would roll over in forty three minutes, take a deep breath, and never exhale.

Darcy ignored the moisture in her eyes, and shut the door. The man was going to die, death had marked him, and no doctor could help. She knew all of it with perfect clarity.

Numbly, she made her way out of the hospital. Diane made a fuss over her, mascara running and cheeks grey, but she just asked to go home.

Darcy decided that she knew enough. Mostly, she had found that some part of her always seemed to understand what to do, that this ability became as natural with use as walking or talking. She didn’t want to use it anymore, just wanted to enjoy the part of her life that was the teenager going off to college.

Her plan worked for the most part, until she woke up screaming one night her first semester of senior year.

Feeling the cold mist and knowing where she was did little to stop the terror at finding herself freezing in MSS wearing only her pajamas.

There was the familiar window and, beyond it, what was clearly a professor’s office with diplomas decorating the walls and a large clock reading 12:40, a woman was seated at the desk. When she looked up from her paperwork, Darcy recognized the pretty face of Dr. Betty Ross. The brilliant scientist’s image and reputation was heavily utilized by the university, so much so that Darcy knew her even though she hadn’t stepped foot in any of the science buildings on campus.

Dr. Ross’s eyes widened at something Darcy couldn’t see, and she scrambled out of her chair. She wasn’t quick enough because a man, made an indistinguishable blur with his speed, was on her in a second. The hand that wrapped around Dr. Ross’s throat gleamed silver in the moonlight.

Darcy closed her eyes and focused on her bed in her apartment, wanting the hell out of MSS and not wanting to see yet another death. When she peaked through her eyelashes, she saw the familiar wrought iron of her bed. A sob burst out of her in relief.

Out of the corner of her vision, the glow of her alarm clock caught her attention. 

The red numbers spelled 11:30 PM, and Darcy stared at the clock, jaw clenched.

She wasn’t going to let someone else die tonight. This wasn’t the same as the others; it didn’t have the same cold air of inevitability.

Darcy could stop this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bet y'all thought a certain brainwashed assassin wouldn't appear until way later, huh? I'm twiddling my imaginary mustache.
> 
> Please let me know what you think in the comments! They're very helpful for me, especially for this chapter, because this is my first truly supernatural piece of writing. I'd love to know that I am doing it semi-coherently :)
> 
> I'm cuddliestcactus on Tumblr, come say hi!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As we say here in Texas, shit is goin' down in this chapter. Plot is picking up!
> 
> Also I technically have a playlist for this story that I'm thinking about posting if anyone would be interested in that sort of thing?

What does a girl with creepy visions wear to stop a cyborg assassin?

If you’re Darcy Lewis, the answer is her Wonder Woman pajama pants colored a bright enough yellow and red that they glowed in the moonlight.

Cursing her thoughtlessness, Darcy did her best to hide behind one of the many oak trees outside the building housing Dr. Ross’ office and checked her watch.

12:30.

She wasn’t a moron. She had a plan.

The only problem was timing, and she had to get it right.

Darcy had thought about going in and getting Dr. Ross to leave with her, but what could she have said to persuade her? She was pretty sure a scientist would take a lot of time to convince and that was time they did not have.

Not to mention that she wasn’t eager to show her party trick to someone who experiments for a living.

There was also the issue of the scary dude with the metal arm. Darcy had taken some self defense, but she doubted that she’d be able to hold her own against the Arnold wannabe so the element of surprise was going to have to suffice.

She was getting the best taser money could buy once this was all over.

Culver University was incredibly proud of their on campus security which is why it had taken approximately 0.2 seconds on their website to find the response time for campus police was 3 minutes.

So at 12:37, Darcy called 9-1-1, asked to remain anonymous, and reported a suspicious character entering the building. She made a big fuss over all the guns he was packing, even though she hadn’t technically seen any in her vision. Darcy figured it was the best way to insure someone higher ranking than old man Stan with his golf cart came to investigate. Stan was great for herding drunk frat boys, but she didn’t want the sweet, legendary campus security guard anywhere near this.

The operator perked up at the news that the man was armed.

“Guns, you said?”

Darcy checked her watch again.

12:38.

“Yes, a lot of guns. You need to get here now. This guy looks dangerous.”

With the sound of fingers racing on a keyboard in the background, the operator responded “Ma’am, I’m sending help now. They’ll be there soon.”

Darcy looked at her wrist.

12:39.

“They won’t be here in time,” Darcy said and hung up.

She took off at a dead run.

\-------------------------------------------- 

Darcy had looked up Dr. Ross’ office before, yes, but she had not wanted to need that knowledge. She should have known that advertized response times were not the actual response times.

“Stupid,” she huffed to herself as she took the stairs two at a time, “So stupid.”

The third floor hallway was dark with the exception of a faint glow coming from a cracked door at the end.

Darcy was so out of breath she couldn’t even appreciate the hilarity of running towards the bright, white light.

She busted through the door with nary a thought nor a plan, but Darcy’d always been quick on her feet.

She was right about him being armed to the teeth. The metal hand around Dr. Ross’ neck never wavered as he let a knife loose as soon as the door opened inwards.

Adrenaline and her preternatural knowledge of the scene she’d find were the only reasons she was able to duck out of the knife’s path in time.

The thud of the knife in the door hadn’t finished resounding before he had a pistol drawn and aimed at her head.

Darcy did the logical thing.

She screamed.

\--------------------------------------------- 

He hadn’t seen someone dodge a knife of his in…

He couldn’t remember.

But he doesn’t think it’s happened often.

If ever.

So he drew his gun.

Harder to dodge a bullet.

Well, he could, but this girl was clearly a civilian.

She did have a hell of a set of lungs going for her.

There was something about her that had the hair on the back of his neck raising, though.

He was a millisecond from putting a hole in between her eyes when he was distracted.

Not from his mission.

Dr. Ross was seconds from unconsciousness.

Seconds after that to death.

Mission said to make it personal.

Nothin’ more personal than strangling somebody.

But his trigger finger wasn’t moving.

Not when he didn’t know where the hell this fog was coming from.

Could be a biological agent.

His mask would take care of that.

His eyes darted around. 

A hole suddenly appeared in the wall, the edges hazy.

The hole showed snow, but it had been warm when he came in, hadn’t it?

The sound of a train horn ripped through his head.

Unbeknownst to him, his metal hand was relaxing around Betty Ross’ throat.

The hole showed snow and mountains and a train car with a chunk blown out of it.

He stood transfixed.

His arms were limp at his side.

Couldn’t even register the girl dragging Ross off.

He just stared at the window.

He could hear a man yelling from it.

Could hear him yelling “Bucky!” over and over.

\----------------------------------------------- 

‘Note to self: scream vision questing is a totally great distraction technique,’ Darcy thought to herself as she tugged an incoherent Dr. Ross to the elevator. There was no way she could haul another person down three flights of stairs in a timely manner, so she had to hope that whatever trance that hobosassin was in would hold long enough for them to get the hell out of there.

She shoved the good doctor in and slammed the button, heart pounding in her ears as she kept an eye on the hall through closing doors.

Dr. Ross slumped in the corner rubbing her red neck. Darcy practiced keeping enough air in her chest in case she needed to yell again.

And tried really hard to ignore ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ playing through the speakers in the small space.

“What was that?”

Dr. Ross’ voice was more of a breathy rasp. Having the daylight’s choked out of you by a metal hand did that to you, Darcy guessed.

“Dude tried to kill you. Piss anyone off recently?”

A part of Darcy thought she shouldn’t be quite so glib, but Jesus, she’d just faced an honest to God assassin. Who does that?

“Actually, that part doesn’t really surprise me. I’m talking about you screaming, and then the… portal? That came out of nowhere?” Dr. Ross’ voice evened out, and she pushed herself from the wall.

Darcy had really hoped the doc had been too out of it to notice that.

“Um?” Darcy was too wrought with adrenaline to care about being convinving, “You were hallucinating?”

Didn’t help that she sounded like she’d sucked down a whole balloon’s worth of helium.

The elevator doors opened, and Darcy carefully peered out. The lobby was well lit, and she saw no scraggly haired men so she grabbed Dr. Ross’ hand and booked it to the exit.

They’d cleared the building, and were running under the cover of the oaks when the sirens rang out.

“Thank God, it took them long enough,” Darcy sighed.

Dr. Ross stopped them at the edge of the trees and levelled her with a look.

“You didn’t call the police while we were in there. So you had to have called them before. Which means you knew what was going to happen.”

Darcy had seen a lot of movies and watched a lot of television. She definitely had seen enough to know that whatever the hell she was, she would make a tantalizing study for the right parties, and she was not down to be anyone’s guinea pig.

Some of that must have shown on her expression because the next minute Dr. Ross’ face had softened. “I’m not going to… do anything to you. I just have a habit of talking out loud. Figuring things out, I guess,” the sirens were getting louder and she turned her head in their direction, “Look, I know what happens to special people. I’ve seen it first hand, and it isn’t something I would wish on anyone. I won’t say anything. Promise. But you need to get out of here before the police get here. The less you’re implicated, the better.”

Dr. Ross put her hand on Darcy’s shoulder, and ducked her head to meet her gaze.

“And thank you. You saved my life. I won’t forget that.”

She gently pushed her, signaling that she should get going.

Darcy nodded, the events of the night finally creeping up on her, a delayed wave of fear and anxiety finally crashing through her. Her breathing was starting to hitch, and she needed to run if she was going to get out clean.

But first, “You’ll be okay, right?”

Dr. Ross smiled, and Darcy thought the kindness remarkable.

“I’ll be fine. Go.”

Darcy went.

\-------------------------------------------------- 

By the time she got back to her apartment, it was only 1:40. Theoretically, she could have gotten some sleep, but massive adrenaline rushes and subsequent crashes are really only good for breaking down in the shower and not for a restful night.

She spent hours huddled on the couch in her living room, jumping at every noise outside her window. When the sun came up, Darcy was curled in a ball, freezing but still too scared to put a blanket on in case she needed to move quickly.

At 10, she had finally rationalized to herself that if someone was going to come after her, it would have already happened.

At 11, she convinced herself to get up off the couch and into the shower.

At 12, she’d cried out most of the water in her body and had the worst hangover of her young life without any of the pleasantries of having been drunk.

At 1, she had dressed, eaten, and mostly stopped shaking.

At 2, she left the apartment.

It was fine to break down so long as you got back up.

\------------------------------------------ 

“Mission report, soldier.”

“There was… snow.”

The asset had almost been sighted by university cops. It was absurd. Their greatest weapon, kept hidden for almost 70 years, nearly exposed by glorified rent-a-cops.

Untenable.

“There was no snow. It’s 72 degrees outside. Mission report.”

The asset clenched its jaw, a defiance that ought to have been beaten out of it by now.

“There was snow. And a mountain. And…”

There was that defiance again.

“And what?”

“Bucky.”

Alexander Pierce was too old, had been at this too long, to let any of his surprise show on his face. The asset had it’s moments, sure, but it had never truly remembered anything.

Not while under his command, at least.

There was little to do but wipe it and put it on ice.

Later, in his office on the top floor of the Triskelion, he was going over the report that supporting officers had put together on the failed assassination of Betty Ross.

It was a pity that she had survived. There was some poetry in using her death to lure out the Hulk. SHIELD knew where he was, of course, but Fury refused to take action while the monster was seemingly under control.

The death of the woman he loved, Pierce had thought, would be enough to break that control. And Pierce had quite a lot of experience in breaking people’s control.

Now, however, there was too much scrutiny on Ross given that gorilla she called a father and his protective tendencies. Pierce could admire his tenacity, but the man’s tunnel vision was a weakness waiting to be exploited.

The report said that an anonymous 9-1-1 call had come in claiming to have seen an armed character enter the building. Authorities found Betty Ross, injured but stable, outside the building. She claimed she had fought her attacker off, but that was clearly a lie. She’d have more than just a bruised neck if she was telling the truth.

The asset itself had been useless in piecing together what happened.

Something had triggered it, the question was what.

The 9-1-1 call had come from a student, Darcy Lewis, according to his sources. It was an anomaly that the asset had been seen by a civilian.

Pierce hadn’t gotten to where he was by ignoring anomalies.

Darcy Lewis.

He wouldn’t forget the name.

\------------------------------------------- 

It took Darcy a week to work up the courage to go see Dr. Ross. She could have let it be, she supposed, but she didn’t like leaving a variable unknown.

Dr. Ross was back in her office, although Darcy wasn’t sure why she didn’t leave for a less murder-y atmosphere.

But hey, to each their own coping mechanism.

Darcy knocked on the open door, startling Dr. Ross from her notes.

“Oh!,” her blue eyes went even more Disney, “It’s you!”

The jazz hands Darcy threw up were excessive, but she was nervous and should be forgiven. “Tada!”

Dr. Ross generously gave her a chuckle for her effort.

“I thought maybe I should swing by and, you know, at least introduce myself. Given that you’re keeping my secret and all?” Darcy peered at her over her glasses.

“Lips are sealed. Yours is honestly not even the strangest thing I know, believe it or not.” Deciding not to think about that too deeply, Darcy took a seat in one of the overstuffed chairs in front of her desk.

“Excellent. Darcy Lewis, pleased to meet you under way less stressful circumstances,” she said, extending her hand.

“Betty Ross. Please call me Betty.” Her grip was firm and soft and the most comforting thing Darcy had felt in days.

“Nice to meet you.”

Betty tidied up her notes a bit, and then leaned on her elbows towards Darcy. “I feel like I should be doing something more than just thanking you. I’d be dead if you hadn’t intervened.”

Darcy felt a slight blush in her cheeks because gratitude for heroism is totally flattering. “Eh, don’t worry about it. All in a day’s work. Unless you wanna give me my six science credits or something because they’re the only thing I need to graduate and I so don’t want to take Geology 101.”

It was meant to be a joke, but Betty looked thoughtful.

“Actually, I think I know someone who could help with that. As long as you don’t mind the desert.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: Character death
> 
> Also I don't have a beta so if anyone spots glaring mistakes, please let me know!

“I don’t understand how you went to three and a half years of college and managed to not take a single science class,” Darcy could hear her mother’s disbelief despite the 1,500 or so miles and spotty cell reception. “Actually, I don’t understand how I didn’t notice that you hadn’t taken any of your science credits.”

Darcy rolled her eyes and sighed. “Why would you notice? I’ve been doing my own course selection the whole time, and only keep you appraised of my stellar GPA. Safer that way for everybody.”

“Careful, young lady, or you’re going to make me think you don’t need your dear old mom anymore.”

“I am pretty self-sufficient, you know,” Darcy sniffed as she tried yet again to make the coffee machine produce actual coffee and not the strange slime it started putting out that morning.

“That you are, honey. Although, I see that the modesty didn’t take,” Diane laughed.

“Yeah because modesty is totally something our family is known for…” Darcy gave the machine a hard whack, “And yes! I am the Master of my Domain and all kitchen appliances bow at my feet!”

“From the sounds of it, you’ve beaten the thing into submission?”

“Damn straight, Mother! Just in time, too, since Jane’s Yoda should be here soon. We’re taking him out in the Scooby Van tonight.”

Darcy grabbed the thermoses to double check that they were mold free. She wasn’t sure that this internship had taught her anything about science, but it certainly had taught her a hell of a lot about scientists.

Well, one scientist: Dr. Jane Foster.

When Dr. Foster had picked her up from the airport, Darcy hadn’t been sure what to expect. Betty had only asked for her resume and told her she’d take care of her credit situation. Two days later, she’d received a startlingly brief email from a jfoster@culver.edu congratulating her on getting the astrophysics internship in New Mexico and telling her to be at the Albuquerque airport by 5 pm on February 1st. It had taken 4 ignored emails and one stilted phone call, number gotten through semi-legal means involving skills Darcy may or may not have picked up from her freshman year hook up buddy who was now in jail for allegedly hacking certain corporate bank accounts, before Darcy could get more information out of Dr. Foster like, oh, how long the internship would last and what the hell they would actually be doing.

So Darcy had been mildly apprehensive wheeling her luggage out of baggage claim, blinking at all the people milling about, realizing she didn’t even know what Dr. Foster looked like so finding her may prove problematic.

Or so she thought until, from the middle of the wall of people waiting for their loved ones, she heard some intense grunting, followed by the violent expulsion of a small brunette pushing her way to the front. She was wearing an alpaca sweater in the most garish shade of puke green that Darcy had ever seen.

Darcy wanted ten.

The ferocious, tiny tyrant braced her back against the throng of people, squared her shoulders, and yelled at the top of her lungs, “DARCY LEWIS!”

She didn’t know why she turned around to check that the woman was not talking to some other Darcy Lewis, but she could only blame it on being so startled. Once she realized she was being an idiot, she spun back around and rolled with it.

“DR. FOSTER!” she roared back.

Sure, a lot of people were giving them bewildered looks, but Darcy liked the cut of this lady’s jib.

Dr. Foster gave a nod of what Darcy thought was approval, grabbed a hand to shake, swiped one of the rolling suitcases, and was on her way.

All in all, they worked well together. Darcy didn’t know squat about astrophysics, but she was a hard enough worker that Jane didn’t seem to mind. Darcy had originally thought that Jane was uptight in all of her intensity, but after she took over the correspondence for the lab, Darcy changed her mind. A good chunk of the mail Jane seemed to get was stuffy, rude scientists belittling her work or worse belittling Jane herself.

Darcy thought that would make anyone a little intense and gave Jane considerable leeway when it came to social niceties after that.

Deciding to read Jane’s seemingly stand off-ish behavior as commitment to her research meant that Darcy began picking up a lot of the slack in general administration and, you know, normal human functions. She made it her mission to make it as easy as possible for Jane to go into Science! comas and found Jane to be an adorable, wee genius.

She wouldn’t say that they were friends, as they didn’t have much at all in common, but they liked each other well enough and were excellent co-workers.

However, as the visit of Jane’s mentor, Dr. Erik Selvig, loomed ever closer, Jane had become increasingly anxious. Their white boards had a now permanent pink tinge from constant erasing and rewriting, Jane’s hair got both more oily and more frizzy which Darcy thought was a phenomenon that deserved study of its own, and what had been quaint little note piles were quickly evolving into Hoarders level mazes. Darcy had banished Jane from the lab three hours ago to take a nap and a shower before Dr. Selvig got there.

Darcy carefully sniffed the pot of freshly brewed coffee and trusted that none of that slime was contaminating it. Pouring a cup, she whimpered “Down the hatch,” and took a swig.

“Well? Did it kill you?” Diane asked.

Rolling her eyes at her mother's lack of sympathy, she replied “Not as good as our stuff at home but better than Starbucks.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you were too spoiled.”

“No such thing! Sorry, Mom, but I’ve gotta go finish getting the van ready for our desert tour tonight.”

“Ok, I love you. Be safe!”

“Please, nothing ever happens here.”

Darcy would later come to regret saying that.

\----------------------------------------------------------------- 

“I think that was legally your…,” Darcy tripped over nothing, feeling faint, “ fault?”

Darcy had some adrenaline pumping through her. She had just _hit a person with a van_ , but she wasn’t all that worried about the guy. There was no prickle at the back of her throat or encroaching shadow, so the dude was totally going to live. She knew that before she got out of the van, so she had moved on to the legal consequences of using your boss' car as a human whack-a-mole.

She wasn’t prepared for all of her blood to rush up and flood her head or for the sudden iciness in her fingertips. When Jane yelled for her to get the first aid kit, she gladly stumbled back to the van, trying to catch her breath. The further away she got from the man she’d just hit, the better she felt.

So either her sixth sense was broken, or something was seriously up with that guy. She looked over her shoulders to see Jane hunched over the man. First aid kits could wait, she needed to get Jane the hell away from him. 

She reached them as he turned over. 

“Woah, does he need CPR?” Darcy shakily spoke, hoping her mouthing off would have Jane snapping something back at her and taking her focus off the prostrate guy, “Because I totally know CPR.”

No such luck.

He flopped on his back like a beached whale, and she got her first good look at him.

He looked… wrong.

His skin was glowing, burning bright like she was 5 feet from the sun instead of 5 feet from a person. Except she didn’t think he was a person. People had energies that ebbed and flowed or souls that wavered or whatever it was that she felt when they died, but this guy… this guy was just leaking light from every pore. A quick glance at Jane and Erik confirmed her suspicion that she was the only one seeing the freaky-deaky glow worm effect.

Jane’s question of where he came from was a lot more chilling given what Darcy could see.

When the massive dude struggled to his feet and started clomping around, Darcy felt her panic increase even as she got off another quip about his hammered state. When he started in on their group demanding answers to nonsensical questions, Darcy was ready with her newly bought taser.

His declaration that he was Thor was accompanied by another angry burst of light from him, and Darcy discovered that she was more trigger ready than she’d realized.

She almost missed the fading of his glow as they loaded him up in the van.

He stayed dim.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy always won at poker.

She could bluff and lie and keep all her ticks at bay when she wanted.

So the hospital was a piece of cake.

Well, she was a little worried that she would end up spending a chunk of her trust fund on lawyer fees if charges were brought up, but she was way more concerned with the fact that she knew, in that same way she knew Grandma was gone or that she couldn’t save that boy in that fire or that the man was dying next in the hospital or that she could save Betty, she knew that the man from the desert was not human.

It’s not like she hadn’t realized there was more out there than just the lovely citizens of Earth. Mephisto really did not fit ‘human’ qualifications, but it was something else to randomly run into a total non-human. She thought it would keep her up that night, but she must have been getting better at these crazy situations. She went right to sleep.

Erik and Jane’s bickering awoke her the next morning. She had the tiny room off the main floor of the old car dealership Jane was using as a lab so could hear a pin drop even while burrowed in her blankets. She made it over to them as they started talking about an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and innocently asked what it was.

By the look on Erik’s face, you would have thought she’d asked him to drop trou and samba.

“I thought you were a science major?”

“Political science,” she corrected, straightening her glasses and trying her best not to feel insulted.

Jane muttered “She was the only applicant,” except she shrugged her shoulder and tucked her head like she was asking a question.

Jane was clearly terrible at poker.

Not for the first time, Darcy wondered what Betty had done to get her this internship.

Darcy wandered off and left Jane trying to justify her work, and by extension her actual self, to the man who was an obvious father figure to her. Something about how hard Jane was arguing, how much she wanted Erik’s approval sang to Darcy because she couldn’t help but support Jane by pointing out that they had an actual photo of that man careening from the wormhole.

As she watched Jane scurry off to retrieve the definitely not human man from the hospital, it occurred to Darcy that she maybe should have left well enough alone.

\-------------------------------------------------------- 

Finding empty restraints was creepy.

Finding medical rooms destroyed by the person who had escaped the restraints was disturbing.

Finding said person by hitting him with the van again was kind of funny.

Finding that the dude was seriously cut was extremely pleasant.

Finding out that hot guys with chipmunk cheeks full of eggs, hamming it up for the camera gets you 239 likes on Facebook within the hour was excellent.

Finding out your brilliant boss gets flustered by handsome, yet vaguely rude dudes was amazing.

Finding out that she could mostly relax around him, even though he was totally not human even if he had stopped glowing, was reassuring.

Finding out that the government had taken her iPod was fucking stupid.

She had just put like thirty songs on there.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy was not happy that Jane was poking at the angry bear of a shadowy government agency.

For Jane’s sake, of course, but also because, hello, she was kind of ripe for government experimentation and all that.

Darcy was not to going to star in the real life X-Files, not even if you guaranteed her own Mulder. 

The fact that Jane had driven Thor to the satellite site did not surprise her. Poor Erik was blindsided, but Darcy thought that was foolish. He’d seen Thor’s abs and should have known their power.

Still, it was obvious how much Erik cared for Jane and how much he worried because the fight they got in after he’d picked her up was eerily reminiscent of fights Darcy had had with her own mother growing up. Being privy to it was as bad as when she had been a kid over at a friend’s house only for the friend to get in trouble with their parents. She never knew where to look or whether to leave or where she would even go.

Erik yelled more loudly, and Darcy thought that this was exactly like that. Even if she went to bed, she’d still be able to hear them.

She buried her nose in one of Erik’s books from the library to avoid the awkwardness.

That Myeuh-Myeuh thing was staring up at her from the page. The happy exclamation she made about it was laying it on a little thick, but she was desperate to stop this pseudo father-daugher fight.

Chiming in about how primitive cultures would see aliens as gods was mostly about her proving she knew about things, too.

Jane did not have to look so shocked at her input.

Jane absolutely should not have looked so shocked when she later hacked the DMV as part of their rescue Maybe-Really-Thor-Definitely-At-Least-An-Alien-Dude plan.

Darcy had mad skills, yo.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

She woke up briefly to the sounds of people on the roof. It was Jane’s happy place when she needed a break from the world or from her assistant.

On the one hand, Darcy hoped Jane wasn’t banging Thor because alien biology seemed like something better left unexplored.

On the other hand, Darcy hoped Jane was banging him because the dude was hot as sin.

She stuffed her head under the pillow and let Jane be her own woman.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

It turns out Darcy’s totally okay with aliens if they made her breakfast.

She’s less okay with the dudes with mics on the building across the street spying on them.

They were only like fifty feet from the lab that had floor to ceiling windows, so she wasn’t sure who they thought they were kidding.

She honestly couldn’t resist waving to one while Erik chugged his alka seltzer. The government dudes went for cover like she’d shot at them.

Neat.

Erik went to presumably upchuck his eggs while Jane went to go change out of her pajama pants, leaving Darcy alone with the benevolent, giant alien.

He was staring at her so she thought that Jane might not have covered table manners yet in her etiquette lessons with Thor.

“Rude to stare, my man,” Darcy helpfully informed him.

He smiled that golden retriever smile back.

“I meant no offense. I was merely curious,” he titled his head in apology.

Ignoring the alarm bells going off in her head, a habit she should really get around to breaking, Darcy asked “Curious about what?”

Thor looked pointedly over her shoulder at the agents who were trying and failing to be more covert with their espionage.

“Perhaps now is not the time. But you are not what you seem, are you?”

Darcy Lewis had never had a tell, and she wasn’t starting today, not when it really counted.

“Don’t know what you could possibly mean,” Darcy said, serene smile in place as she got up to clear the dishes.

She was pretty sure it was respect she saw reflected in his eyes. 

Thor’s friends showed up abruptly about an hour later, glowing so brightly that it hurt her eyes. She softly hummed _shine bright like a diamond_ to herself as she went to get the broom for their shattered mugs.

Everyone in battle armor cocked their head at her, so she must not have been as quiet as she thought. Then they had yet another thing falling from space, and all hell broke loose.

The giant, fire-breathing robot tossing cars like they were bouncy balls topped her list of Scariest Shit.

Darcy was amassing quite the list.

She left the fighting to the professionals and worked with Erik to clear the down. She found a dog running scared, saved it, named it Baxter, and sent it to safety; all the while trying to avoid flying debris and being melted by stray flames.

As far as disasters went, she thought it was going alright. No one had died, the town was cleared, everyone seemed in one piece if a little battered, Thor said he had a plan.

The need to scream stopped her in her tracks.

She looked up to see Thor calmly walking to the DeathBot and drew blood with how hard she bit her lips trying to keep in the scream.

He was going to die.

\--------------------------------------------------------------- 

Thor totally didn’t die.

Well, actually, he did. She choked on her scream, but she still knew the instant his life went out. She could see it fade, even without the help of her voice or MSS visions. It dissipated from him like a mist: heat leaving a cooling body.

But then there was wind and lightning and there he was, dressed in armour and glowing again, a beacon through the smoke.

The burst of life where before there had been death made her skin itch like it was stretched too tight, but the sensation passed quickly.

Almost as quickly as Thor’s battle with the Destroyer. 

Everything moved swiftly after that.

There was a lot of posturing from Agent Coulson, who will forever be known as Son of Coul, thanks to Thor, and an agreement over Jane’s research was reached. The political scientist in her noted that sweet victory was a great lubricant for negotiation.

Darcy was totally jealous that Jane gets to fly Air Myeuh-Myeuh the whole drive to the Bifrost site, but soon felt terrible about the pettiness at the sight of her boss’ face when Thor didn’t come back.

As they stood there in the last of the sun’s rays, Darcy gently shoved Jane’s shoulder with her own. “He would have come back if he could,” she said.

Jane clenched her jaw before answering. 

“If he can’t get here on his own…”

She let her voice trail off as she smiled, eyes lighting up the way they always did before she started explaining something particularly sciencey to Darcy.

“We’ll have to help,” Erik chimed in from the other side of Jane.

Darcy threw an arm across her back, feeling Erik do the same.

\------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Sometimes nothing hits the spot like a cold beer alone in a dingy bar.

Two weeks AT, After Thor, was one of those times.

It wasn’t that she was working her ass off, what with having to learn Science! while also keeping Jane sane and alive, or that she was going to be in New Mexico indefinitely due to her many NDA’s and her unwillingness to leave Jane and Erik alone in the belly of SHIELD or that she didn’t get to walk at graduation or that she hadn’t been allowed to tell her mother anything close to the truth.

Any one of those things could drive a person to drink, much less the combination of all of them, but Darcy was handling it with aplomb.

No, the reason she was alone drinking now lukewarm beer in the only bar in town was because the constant surveillance by jackbooted thugs was driving her up the wall. They’d tried to be discreet about it, she would give them that credit, but it was pretty hard to hide from someone who could sense life itself.

She kept finding herself staring out windows at particular rooftops, unsure why until a mic holding automaton in a suit and sunglasses popped up. 

Or accidentally tazing that agent when he tailed her in the grocery store.

Or glaring in the direction of an agent hidden behind Jane’s trailer in the middle of night until he finally came out of the shadows and slinked off.

As a coping mechanism, she’d started shooting them with spit balls. Juvenile, she knew, but after one agent followed her into the bathroom of a restaurant, Darcy reached the end of her rope.

She was batting a thousand with 13 newly spit balled agents in the last two days alone. Draining the last of her drink, she moved to get another but a fresh beer slid in front of her. Darcy looked up to find a man rocking a purple hoodie and a bandage across his nose.

She reached for her spit balling straw.

“Woah, woah, I come in peace!” the man held up his hands, palms forward.

She narrowed her eyes at him, and graciously put away her straw. It’d be bad form to punish the bringer of beer.

“I’m a little impressed you knew I was SHIELD,” he said as he made himself at home in the booth, sprawling with one leg hanging off the side.

“You guys are not as sneaky as you seem to think,” Darcy told him as she sipped up the foam.

He watched her for a beat.

“That’s the thing, we kind of are. Which is why we can’t figure out how you spot all of your tails.”

Darcy smiled wide, all teeth and sharp edges. “I’m observant, I guess.”

He let his eyes run down her face, rested them on her chest for a bit too long.

“You’re something alright.”

\------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Clint was a hilarious drunk.

She wasn’t sure why he had decided to get drunk if he had been sent to evaluate her, but he seemed like a dude who did what he wanted.

He was pretty unsubtle about what it was that he wanted.

"You a screamer, Lewis?" Clint tried to leer at her, but it came off a little more drunk puppy than Rico Suave.

If anything deserved a belly laugh, it was that. "Trust me, no one likes it when I scream."

He pouted, but was a decent dude and didn’t press. She appreciated that because she was totally hitting him up for archery lessons the next time she forced Jane to sleep through the day.

Her phone ringing interrupted him trying to convince her that SHIELD had Big Foot locked up in a lab in Wisconsin.

She sent him to the bar for more drinks as she answered.

“Hello?”

“Is this Darcy Lewis?” came a deep voice from the other end.

“This is she,” Darcy answers, only half paying attention because Clint had just doused himself with his beer and was muttering ‘Aw, no, beer’ to himself over and over.

“This is Detective Harris with the Raleigh Police Department. I’m afraid I have some bad news. I’m so sorry to have to tell you that your mother was found dead in her home today.”

Darcy's blood ran cold.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not a lot of Darcy in this one, but I think Clint made for a better POV for this chunk, You'll see why.

Clint had some experience with women erupting into tears in bars.

Ok, a lot of experience.

At least this time he was pretty sure it wasn’t his fault.

He approached cautiously, ready for any sudden movements, history causing him to be wary of weeping women.

“Kid?” Clint used the same voice he’d used that first time he’d met Katie-kate, trying to seem calm and friendly. It hadn’t worked on Kate, but he was factoring in her more violent nature. "You alright?"

Darcy had her face in her hands, tears tinged black from her mascara leaking out between her fingers. She was shaking, but Clint didn't hear anything from her: no shuddering breath, no keening, nothing. Checking his hearing aids and finding nothing wrong, he moved to sit next to her. "Darce?"

The only indication that she had heard him was that she began to dig her nails in where they met her forehead. "Woah, hey girly, let's not do that to your pretty face, ok?" Clint pulled her arms down by her side with more effort than he would have liked. "I need you to tell me what that phone call was about, Darce."

She bit her lips, brutally crushing them between her teeth. Clint was already holding her arms and did not know how to stop her from chewing her goddamn lips off, especially without making a scene.

"Jesus, please stop hurting yourself, ok? Just tell me what happened or what I can do."

She whimpered, but at least stopped trying to draw blood. "There you are, that was good," Clint dared to release her hands so that he could wrap an arm around her and pull her into his chest. "Who was that on the phone?"

She shook her head, burying her face in his shirt, crying even harder.

"Aw, no, don't cry on my shirt. Wait, I mean don't cry. Don't cry." People liked it when you rubbed their hair, he thought, but when he tried to soothingly pet her head, his watch got caught in her tresses. Clint blinked at his wrist.

"Um."

Darcy kept on leaking all over his chest, damp spot growing, while he tried to subtly shift her hair out of the metal. When he thought he was in the clear, he swiftly yanked his arm back down. Except for how the hair was apparently wrapped more tightly than he thought and he instead jerked the poor girl's head down into his crotch.

Clint decided that he should just stop moving.

"Uh. This looks bad."

The safest thing to do was definitely not stare at the brunette face down in his lap, but Clint didn't know where the hell else to look.

At least she wasn't crying anymore. He didn’t know if hysterical laughter was any better, though. If it was laughter. It sounded a little weird like it was full of static, but maybe his hearing aids were fritzing again.

“Oh my God.” she huffed, hoarse from her sobbing, “Oh my God. This can’t be happening.”

“This is actually very normal for me, believe it or not,” he replied while successfully disentangling her hair.

Darcy gingerly rubbed at where her hair had been tugged, but didn’t really move from his lap. She just laid there, laughing. Except the laughing was definitely coming in fuzzy. He discreetly tapped the aids, but everything else sounded normal. Just her laugh was… not right. 

“Not this, but,” she laughed or cried and squeezed her eyes shut again, “The call was…” 

Clint went for her shoulder this time and hoped the rubbing was comforting rather than creepy. Shoulder was neutral. Just enough pressure that she could feel his hand through her sweater. He knew all about location and pressure. You couldn’t always use arrows, after all.

Darcy was still talking, but he’d forgotten to pay attention with all his efforts at a platonic, totally not weird shoulder pat, “… think it was a heart attack.”

Clint had no clue what she was talking about, but she had stopped crying at least. He made an encouraging ‘hm’ noise that was ambivalent enough that she wouldn’t know she’d lost him.

He was killing it on the comforting front. “There, there,” he said before he could help himself. Darcy wasn’t noticing regardless; she was staring at the wet spot she’d made on his hoodie.

“I just… She’s gone. My mom’s gone.”

His hand froze in its deranged petting. This was definitely out of his wheel house.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------- 

He wasn’t so egotistical that he had trouble admitting defeat. If you didn’t know when you were in over your head, then you’d make a shitty assassin.

Which was why he had practically carried a drunk, broken Darcy out the bar and back to the lab. He rolled his eyes at the bike lock looped through the handles of the front door. Dr. Foster was committed, he’d give her that, but did she really think that something anyone could buy for ten bucks at Walmart would keep SHIELD out? Clint had the door opened in less than a minute even with the handicap of an arm full of semi-catatonic girl.

He settled Darcy at the kitchen table, not bothering with telling her to stay put. She was barely blinking, so he doubted she was going anywhere. Making his way out the back, he waved off an approaching Agent Kirk. The kid didn’t need any more people in her business. 

Dr. Foster’s trailer was dark, but that was unsurprising. Last he’d checked, she had been in the lab for eighteen hours and counting. The woman was ruthless when it came to her work, but Clint had seen for himself the smile she had for Darcy when the kid shoved pop-tarts under the doc’s nose. He’d heard the bickering over the right way to make coffee or how often a person really needed to shower.

It may have been a long time since his relationship with Barney had resembled anything good or healthy, but Clint could still recognize Jane and Darcy’s relationship for what it was: affectionate, close, and familial. He could have been mistaken, but he knew what effect life or death situations had on people.

So with all the certainty of a man who knew he was doing the right thing, he banged on the metal door of the trailer with both fists, fully aware of the wrath he was invoking.

His first thought when Dr. Foster ripped open her door was that SHIELD needed to hire her for interrogations.

“Who the ever loving fuck are you and what in Frigga’s name do you fucking want?” she growled, impressively terrifying for someone with dried toothpaste on her chin.

He held his hands up, palms out for the second time that night, officially in  
Don’t Shoot Pose more times than even the Budapest mission. “It’s Darcy!”

Dr. Foster’s whole body immediately went from irate to alert. She raised to the balls of her slippered feet, eyes narrowing and hands firmly placed on her hips. “What about Darcy? Where is she? What did you do to her?” With each question, she took a step down the stairs from her trailer.

Clint didn’t back down because he was Strike Team Delta for Christ’s sake, but it was a near thing. “She got some bad news, in the lab, and nothing! You’ve got some serious trust issues.”

She scowled at that, but at least backed up out of his personal bubble. “What bad news?” She peered around him like she thought she’d be able to see her intern through cement walls.

“That her mom died tonight.”

Dr. Foster’s gaze snapped back to him. “What?”

“I don’t know the details. We were at the bar having a good time when she got a phone call and started sobbing. I figured the best move was to bring her to you.”

She spun around to pull her trailer door closed; then tied her robe with short, furious movements as she came all the way down her stairs. “Yeah. Best move. I’ve got this,” she looked up at him, seemingly unbothered with the huge height difference between them now that they were on even ground, “I’ll take care of Darcy.” She nodded to herself like all that the universe needed for something to be true was for her to say it out loud.

She moved past him, but stopped just short of the lab. Twisting her neck to look back at him, she called out “Thank you. For bringing her to me.”

Then she turned back and went inside.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Clint had been drinking warm beers outside under the stars for about an hour before Coulson found him. He’d picked them up from a gas station on his way back to base and figured he’d avoid his responsibilities by curling up outside in the dirt. Cold desert and flat beer were honestly preferable than having to go give his mission report.

The original file SHIELD had made on Darcy Lewis had only been about half a page, the notable things about her were a good academic record and being the sole heir of an old family from the coast. After every single agent assigned to watch her had been caught with their metaphorical pants down, including Hawkeye himself once, it was clear that the file had missed something. There were some ID’s she’d made that Clint thought even Nick Fury would have missed. Given they were still based on the battleground of Norse Gods come to life, this anomaly made people twitchy.

Coulson had assigned him to, in Coulson speak, “evaluate Darcy Lewis and reassess her threat level”. Clint had done this kind of op before, and it almost always was in relation to the Index. He got it, he really did. The world was a big, scary place with ever changing threats. In order for those threats to be controlled, data had to be accumulated and monitored.

All very logical and straight forward. He’d never had a problem with it before.

But now he couldn’t help but see her face, eyes full of tears as she broke over losing her mother, her only family, and he had a big problem with the idea of her being put on anyone’s list.

Technically, he didn’t have a reason to put her on the list. She didn’t have any powers that he’d confirmed. 

Except there was something at the base of his skull that felt it.

Felt that she was something else.

With what he did, he knew how to trust his instincts. He’d even had this feeling before, with other people who were eventually proven to be more than they appeared and put on the Index. Call it primal instinct, an old buried impulse that recognized danger, but he may not know who or what Darcy was; he just knew it was Other.

This was exactly what Coulson had wanted him to determine, and that was exactly why he’d been drinking lukewarm beer outside of HQ until Coulson found him.

“Barton,” Coulson eyed the can in his hands with barely concealed disgust, “Couldn’t you at least get a cooler out here?”

Clint smiled at him, having always liked working with Coulson. The man was good, personable, and trust worthy. It made what Clint was about to do uncomfortable.

Her eyes had been so big and so wet.

“After such a boring night, I had to drown my sorrows immediately.”

“Boring?” Coulson asked, eyebrow lifted in skepticism.

“Boring might be a bit disrespectful. Fun girl, but ultimately, she was just that: a girl. Observant little thing. Remember that cologne Nat got me for Christmas last year? Apparently, it was one her ex wore and he was enough of a jerk that she always notices it when she smells it. I was betrayed by my own vanity,” Clint said and let the next bit be coated in just enough lecherousness to sell with his reputation, “Hot as hell, though. Shame about her mother. Could have been a fun night instead of just a sad one.”

Coulson cocked his head in polite interest, but was clearly already itching to go back to more important things.

Clint took a drink, curling his nose at the taste. “Got a call from back home. Mom died tonight of a heart attack.”

“She’ll be going home then, presumably,” Coulson replied looking thoughtful.

“I think the Doc will go with her,” Clint explained dropping off Darcy at the lab.

“Just as well. We aren’t making as much progress here as the Director would like. You’ll most likely be accompanying Selvig to our Phoenix site.” 

Clint gave him a mock salute and clicked his heels together. “Sir, yes, sir.”

He heard Coulson muttering something about smart asses as he walked away. Clint stayed outside a little longer, wondering if he had made the right call.

In the end, it didn’t matter, of course.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy couldn’t remember most of the week her mother died. She remembered the call. She remembered Clint being kind. And she remembered Jane being the rock upon which she rested.

Jane was there to get them tickets to North Carolina. Jane was there to pack their things. Jane was there to book a hotel room when Darcy threw up in her front yard before she could enter her childhood home. Jane was there to lay right next to Darcy holding her hand the first night even though there were two beds because Darcy couldn’t stop shaking. Jane was there to talk with the police because Darcy couldn’t manage to ask the right questions. Jane was there to help some of Diane’s friends plan the funeral, everyone agreeing that it would be cruel to expect Darcy to do it.

And Jane was there to stand behind Darcy when Darcy cried at the podium at the head of the church, while she tried to describe the woman her mother had been to her and to everyone who knew her. Jane’s hand on Darcy’s back had been the one thing that allowed Darcy to focus enough to pull through saying goodbye to her mother.

On the sixth day, Darcy could finally get through the front door of her house, and Jane was there with her for every step.

On the seventh day, Darcy didn’t cry, and she sat with Jane in the living room going through old scrap books her mom had put together and telling Jane stories about growing up Lewis.

On the eighth day, she left to go meet with her mother’s attorneys without Jane. Jane had wrung her hands, but Darcy thought she deserved a break from taking care of her pathetic intern. Jane had looked so affronted on Darcy’s behalf that she furrowed her eyebrows hard enough to become an actual unibrow. Darcy laughed until she fell to the floor, and soon Jane was down there giggling with her. Darcy left feeling a little lighter. Jane took a well deserved nap.

The ninth day Darcy alternatively spent freaking out over not having taken economics more seriously and packing away parts of the house to be dealt with at a later date. What did a twenty-two year old know about running finances? Also how safe was it to just leave a house sitting empty? Jane assured her that it would be fine, and she had set up a system with some of Diane’s friends to check in on it until they could come back and decide what to do with it later. Darcy cried that Jane had said ‘we’.

By the tenth day, the day that she and Jane were going back to New Mexico, Darcy had more or less come up with a plan. She didn’t have anyone but Jane, now, and the thought of leaving her was panic inducing. So on the plane ride home, Darcy asked if she could stay on working for Jane.

“Darcy, you know I’m here for you. You don’t need to work for me; we’ve been through too much for us to just be Professor and intern. Also, you graduated,” Jane rushed to reply, worried.

“I know all of that. We’re besties for life. Bonds of friendship forged through aliens and tragedy. Strong stuff,” Darcy nudged her side, “But I wasn’t thinking intern. I was thinking more assistant. I don’t know that I can go back to the normal world, not after everything.”

Jane smiled knowingly. “I get that, but I can’t pay you. I’d love to hire you because you’re my friend and you are oddly amazing at data collation given your aversion to science class, but I literally can only afford the indentured servitude of interns on my budget. It’s the lot of being a scientist.”

Darcy huffed out a laugh, trying not to sound as sardonic as she knew she will. “Really won’t be an issue, boss lady.”

Jane scrunched her nose and put on the ‘I am older and wiser and you will listen to me’ voice that she’d used a lot in the last week. With good intentions, of course, and mostly for things that Darcy was usually in charge of like meal times and social etiquette. 

“Darce, you can’t just be an unpaid intern forever, no matter how much I’d love for you to stay with me. You need money; it’s a pretty important part of surviving as an adult.”

“Oh, I know.” For the first time since this whole nightmare began, Darcy didn’t feel like the baby duckling following Jane blindly. It felt good. “But I actually could have been an intern forever even if all I’d had was my trust fund.”

Jane blinked at that.

“Trust fund?”

“Yes, trust fund. Although, now it isn’t just my trust fund. Now it’s…” Darcy couldn’t bring herself to finish the thought, but Jane’s warm hand wrapped around her own just in time.

“Okay,” Jane said, and her smile was only the tiniest bit wobbly. “I trust you to know what you’re doing. But since you apparently can afford it, I’m not springing for your coffee anymore. In fact, you can spring for mine from here on out. That fancy stuff you like so much.”

That made Darcy laugh instead of cry, and she thiought she might love Jane for that. Laying her head on her friend’s bony shoulder, Darcy knew she did.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Alexander Pierce knew the truth about patterns. People thought that they began with threes, but that wasn’t accurate. Those were the same morons who believed in coincidences.

Patterns started with the number two.

He flipped through Agent Kirk’s report on the Thor incident and came to the obvious conclusion.

Here in front of him was a two.

Two times Darcy Lewis was involved in the unexplainable.

SHIELD had cleared her, but SHIELD was weak, vulnerable, and prone to mistakes.

No.

There was a pattern here, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.

Darcy Lewis was going to be _explained_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made a playlist for this story! It can be found on my tumblr, cuddliestcactus.tumblr.com, under the tag fanmix.
> 
> If you like that kind of thing, please check it out! It sets a nice tone :)


	7. Chapter 7

Mephisto hadn’t thought twice about granting the woman’s wish for a baby. It wasn’t a common request he received, usually people desperate enough to call on their devil wanted money, power, substantial things. Substantial to them, at least.

But there had been the occasional desire for a child. Families living within feudal societies in need of heirs, couples wishing to fill some void, what-have-you’s. It was all Greek to him. Or it would be Greek to him if he hadn’t actually known Greek, but he was very familiar. So many calls to so many gods; a people just ripe for his picking. 

Thus he thought nothing of Diane Lewis’ wish, nor of signing a contract with her. Hell, he respected the mortal’s determination to negotiate. Most of them never thought to question his terms, not with the object of their desire so close.

Mephisto signed the revised contract and patted himself on the back for getting such a valuable soul. He didn’t realize his mistake then.

Look, running a hell dimension and holding dominion over a horde of souls was time consuming and distracting. It was understandable that he didn’t notice it at first. By the time he understood the gravity of his predicament, he’d already collected on that blasted contract.

He had felt the disturbances, obviously. Mephisto doubted any of the transdimensional beings missed the ascension of another of their kind. There weren’t many who could so much as sense dimensional boundaries, even fewer still who could physically traverse them. Because they were so few, every being was different in how they manifested their abilities.

The ripple this new player sent out when they moved between dimensions had been strong enough to rouse Mephisto from his sleep. He was curious, but unlike that golden-eyed brute of an Asgardian, Mephisto could not see all. For years, he would feel the shift of that unknown being moving between universes, but their identity remained a mystery.

Then Thor fell to Earth.

The boon of the Odinson’s soul, even as a mere mortal, was too great a temptation to resist. Mephisto sent eyes to appraise the situation rather than go himself. A direct visit from him could be seen as an act of aggression to the All-Father, and not even Thor’s soul was worth war with Asgard. Not yet.

The lesser demons he had sent kept him informed, but the oaf prince was back to his own realm in the blink of an eye. Mephisto had been carrying on with his business in the mean time, and in a move that would have made artists weep at the poetry, had naively collected the very soul that had put this whole situation into motion.

It was that idle curiosity that brought him to the desert that very night. His minions had mentioned the faint scent of magic in the air even after the Odinson had left, and though they believed it harmless, they had still reported it to their master. Fresh from collecting the bright soul of Diane Lewis, Mephisto felt like indulging his curiosity. He walked through the miniscule town, observing the mortal drones in their matching black suits with their metal and plastic weapons, and felt the amusement of a child looking at ants through his magnifying glass. At least this batch seemed to recognize the Asgardians for what they were, rather than what the dim-witted mortals of long ago had believed them to be.

It was quite the evolutionary leap: blind devotion to fear.

The surprise was the magic barely misting through the air. His demons had been right to tell him of it, but so wrong in their assessment. For this magic was rare and unique, known only to a few.

At last, he had found the new transdimensional being. In America of all places.

Following the wisps of magic, sulfur and ice to his nose, he walked passed a broad man in purple being yelled at by a small, berobed woman and found the source within the large glass building.

She was seated at the table, back to him and slumped over with her head on her folded arms. It was odd that she didn’t seem to sense him, but she appeared to be asleep, judging from the steady rise and fall of her sloped back. He circled the table for a look at her face.

Imagine his shock at finding that the powerful new player that he had been feeling for years wore the same face as the girl in all the framed photographs gracing the home of one Diane Lewis.

The small woman coming in from outside broke him from his astonished trance. It was then that he understood the mistake he had made those scant years ago. In every other case of granting a baby, there had been a _couple_ in question: a mother and a father. Except with Diane Lewis.

And magic…

Well, magic had rules and demands and consequences.

Nothing created from nothing; everything created from something.

A soul needed two souls to be born, and magic had found the two souls it needed because it always got it’s own way.

Mephisto looked at the young woman, still an infant compared to his long years, and thought to himself _‘Congratulations, it’s a girl’_.

A girl he could never touch.

Pierce found himself in a conundrum.

It had been months since New Mexico, but he had yet to make his move on the Darcy Lewis problem. At first, it was because the situation was too hot to touch. Coulson, for all his blandness, was a competent, efficient agent and had insured that Dr. Foster & co were well looked after. The lab in New Mexico had remained well guarded and supported by SHIELD with the agent himself on site to supervise. A waste of a good field agent, in Pierce’s opinion, but he was perhaps biased.

Coulson was Fury’s man through and through, and his presence made it impossible for Pierce to make even smallest wave. 

Luckily, the good Dr. Foster had made little progress in her research. The softest whisper into the ear of a single World Security Council member about how ill prepared they had been in the face of alien technology, how a small familial skirmish between gods had levelled a small town, and suddenly SHIELD’s interests lay in weapons development.

Dr. Selvig was moved to work with the Tesseract, Coulson packed up to move on to greener pastures, and Dr. Foster and Ms. Lewis were left alone with a pitiful collection of ‘guards’.

The delay had been for the best. It had given him adequate time to recalibrate the Winter Soldier after his last run in with the mysterious Ms. Lewis. The Soldier was back to peak performance, wiped as clean as a freshly polished pistol.

A good commander gave his soldiers a chance at redemption after a failed mission, after all.

\------------------------------------------- 

It was amazing how much less stressful life was when you didn’t have someone spying on you twenty-four/seven. Ok, it wasn’t really that amazing, but Darcy was too drunk on her new-found privacy to be objective. Not even grumpy-pants Jane would bring her down, not today with the sweet taste of freedom.

Darcy found her friend curled up under her desk. From the looks of things, a tired Jane had decided the dark cave was a perfectly fine place to nap. Darcy wasn’t sure how warm the newspapers Jane had spread over herself were, but the astrophysicist seemed comfortable enough. 

Thinking it better to let Jane get some rest, Darcy left her where she was and started straightening out the lab. It felt a little sacrilegious to destroy the mini fort she and Jane had built out of pens and rubber bands during a study break the days before, but Darcy hardly ever had full reign of the lab to clean. Better to get as much done as she could before Jane woke up.

It was in the midst of cleaning the dishes that she felt it. One second she was struggling to scrape off dried jelly from a plate, the next second, everything in her body was focused on the pinprick of ice just on the perimeter of her consciousness. She dropped the plate and turned, stopping when she felt the cold in front of her, just out of reach. Beyond the wall she faced was the station for the SHIELD personnel that remained in Puente Antiguo to assist her and Jane. The personnel that Darcy knew now were all dead, the ice she felt as much proof to her senses as seeing their lifeless bodies would have been.

Darcy was crouched in front of Jane without having any memory of making the decision to move, shaking the woman awake. “Jane,” Darcy whispered quietly, “Jane, we have to go.”

The newspaper crinkling as it fell from Jane’s shoulders had Darcy wincing. She could feel that tightening in the back of her throat, knew that whatever had taken out the SHIELD agents was almost to the lab. Not for the first time, she cursed the floor to ceiling windows. They were semi covered by the desk and it’s piles of paperwork, but it still felt too exposed.

Jane blinked sluggishly at Darcy, still half-asleep. “Darce? Is it time to eat?”

Darcy had started humming softly under her breath. It was as involuntary as raising a hand to shield her face from a ball coming towards her on the soccer field as a kid, and with a detached clarity, she realized why. She could see, as though she were standing just below him outside, the figure in black climbing the ladder to the roof of the lab. Darcy wasn’t humming loud enough for Jane to hear, it was only enough vibration to warm her throat, but Darcy could still see the threat clear as day. Jane wouldn’t see anything unless she could hear. The figure was already on the roof and heading for the access panel right above their heads. Darcy recognized that metal hand glinting in the sun.

She knew what that hand could do.

“Jane, I need you to trust me. We don’t have much time. Someone’s coming for us, someone dangerous. I need to get us out of here. Do you trust me?” Darcy wouldn’t be able to out run a bullet. She and Jane weren’t built for combat like Thor, and anyone who could have helped them was dead. Darcy had an idea, but the idea scared her almost as much as the thought of again facing off with Betty’s cyborg assassin.

Jane gulped, but answered gamely. “I trust you. What do you want to do?”

The doctor’s eyes were wide with fear, but her pointed chin held steady. Darcy couldn’t let anything happen to Jane. Wrapping her arms around the other woman, Darcy held on tight. She couldn’t let anyone else she loved die. She’d rather have them hate her. 

Darcy tried not to think about how likely that last scenario was as she screamed, arms locked around Jane.

\------------------------------------------------------- 

Admittedly, she hadn’t known for sure that her plan would work. She knew she could move freely to MSS and that she had brought her mom along that one horrific time, but Darcy hadn’t known for sure. In the danger of the moment, Darcy had just done what had come naturally and hoped for the best.

When she opened her eyes, it was to the familiar freezing mists of MSS and to Jane stiff in her arms.

“Darcy,” Jane said, voice full of reproach, “Is there maybe something you forgot to tell me?”

“Um.”

Darcy was scared to move lest she lose her concentration and they be sent back to meet their metallic foe. Jane did not have the same fear. She pushed out of Darcy’s arms to look around them. “Where are we? What did you do?”

Before she could answer, a hole burned through the fog next to them, showing them a picture of the lab they had just left being torn apart by the masked man in black.

Jane shifted towards the window, but Darcy pulled her back by the arm. “Don’t! I…” Darcy was trembling, whether from the adrenaline of seeing the assassin again or from the anxiety of telling her best friend her darkest secret, she didn’t know, “I don’t know how long I can hold us here.”

Jane looked down at where Darcy’s hand was wrapped around her forearm and then again at their surroundings. She removed the hand from her arm and held it loosely with her own. “Where is here?”

“I call it MSS? Stands for Mordor’s Scarier Sister?” Jane snorted at that, and Darcy never knew snorting could be so comforting. “I scream or hum, and I can come here. It’s kind of a long story?”

“You scream, and you go to another dimension.” Jane’s voice was dry, but her eyes narrowed. Her hand gripped Darcy’s. Hard. “Do you mean to tell me that all of this time you’ve been capable of transdimensional travel? That you were literally doing exactly what we’ve been searching for?”

Darcy honestly hadn’t thought of it like that. Shit.

“Um.”

Jane’s fingers were so strong and so bony and definitely cutting of her circulation.

“Maybe you could yell at me after we escape the assassin?”

Jane turned her glare from Darcy to the window. “Fine. But there will be yelling. You said you couldn’t hold us here long?”

“We’ve already been here longer than I ever have. It’s already slipping from me.” She could feel the cold seeping out from her fingers, and tried visualizing everything from igloos to freezers to stave off the warmth. She knew as soon as the cold left, they’d find themselves back in the firing range of the lab.

“Can you put us back outside the lab? Maybe we could make a run for it and get the SHIELD agents from their base?”

Darcy felt terrible about it, but the reminder of the dead agents helped her hold onto the cold. “They’re all dead, Jane,” she got a bewildered look from her friend at that, “Don’t ask, ok, it’s just another thing I definitely know right now. Later.”

Jane shook her head to clear it. “Alright. We’re on our own. And you can’t put us back outside the lab, I’m guessing?”

Darcy could only nod in agreement. Maybe with practice she could move them, but she didn’t know how. She was starting sweat from the strain of maintaining them there. Jane watched a droplet roll down her temple. “We can fight him, maybe? Two of us appearing out of nowhere, we’ve got the element of surprise?”

Darcy wanted to roll her eyes at that, but it was at that moment that her tenuous control broke.

The switch from the cool, dark of MSS to the warm light of the lab was jarring in its immediacy. They blinked at the masked man, and Darcy thought _‘Surprise goes both ways._ ’

\---------------------------------------------------- 

Say what you will about science nerds, but it turns out they were hella handy in a fight. Darcy didn’t know where Jane had gotten her aim from, but so far three paper weights, a stapler and a novelty bust of Galileo had all found their marks. Their marks being a terrifying murder-bot.

Popping out of thin air had given them little advantage, but they’d made use of it by each taking cover behind different desks. Thank God SHIELD had sprung for the sturdy metal ones; they doubled for barricades.

It quickly became apparent that the man was here for Darcy, but Jane had been ferocious in her attempts to draw him away. Darcy was just happy he hadn’t gotten a clear shot of Jane yet. Being so small did yield some advantages.

The bust had been heavy enough to knock him back a pace, so Darcy darted out from her hiding space, trying to get over to Jane and the exit just behind her.

She should have known she couldn’t outpace him. He caught her shoulder and pulled her back so hard she lost her footing. She heard Jane’s panicked yelp and hoped Jane would forgive her for what she was going to do.

Closing her eyes and gathering her breath, Darcy reached out and grabbed at the straps across his chest as she screamed.

She felt the muscles under her hands tense as the temperature around them plummeted. Once the dampness of the mists kissed the back of her neck, she released him. His hand had fallen off her as soon as she had opened her mouth. Warily, she backed away from him as he frantically turned his head around. His goggles covered his eyes, but she didn’t need to see them to know he was afraid.

She could work with that.

The vision of the snowy mountain was easy to bring to the surface. She felt the arctic wind blow from the window forming behind her. Stepping aside to provide an unobstructed view, she felt oddly powerful. He could surely kill her in countless ways, from the guns or knives strapped all over him to that wicked arm, but they were in her world. She held the cards here.

He stood still, head frozen. Darcy didn’t know what compelled her, but she reached up and removed his goggles and his mask.

He didn’t flinch.

His eyes were blue, deep as sapphire. They would have been beautiful if there had been anything besides pain behind them. Darcy’s heart clenched at the contrast they held with the blankness of his face. His mouth was lax, cheeks smooth, not even a ghost of expression. She turned to the window and found a destroyed train car, the man that stood next to her hanging from a broken rail. Until he fell.

An anguished yell of ‘Bucky’ echoed in the empty mists.

“Are you Bucky?” she asked, watching his body in the window crash against rocks and finally land bloody and limp in the snow.

A shuddering, wet breath exploded from the man next to her. She turned to him and found tears working their way down his cheeks.

He wasn’t looking at her or at the window; he was just staring ahead unseeing. In that moment, he was less the dangerous man who had been trying to kill her and more a lost child. Despite the circumstances of both of her meetings with him, an overwhelming sadness was all she felt as she stood there with him. The scene her screams called up from him felt strange, too. Final, as though they’d already happened.

But that was impossible. She saw death, and he was clearly alive.

Wasn’t he?

A thud brought her out of her puzzlement. The man had dropped to his knees and settled his face in his hands. His shoulders shook as he sobbed.

Darcy let the fog fade away and brought them back to the lab. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, too busy breaking down.

His cries resounded in the spacious room, each one louder than the last.

Jane materialized at her shoulder, eying the shaking man cautiously. She grabbed Darcy’s hand and quietly dragged her away.

Darcy cast one last look over her shoulder as they left. Her handiwork left a bitter taste.

\------------------------------------------------------- 

The Soldier was late.

Pierce had brought it to this God-forsaken desert himself, unwilling to relinquish such a delicate operation to someone else. There was also the small chance that the Soldier malfunctioned again, and Pierce had no desire for a failure of that magnitude to have many witnesses.

The Soldier should have returned with the girl an hour ago.

A failure: the likes of which were unprecedented.

Pierce was about to send out a man to look for the Asset when a flash of red in the corner of his eye caught his attention.

When he turned his head, he saw the devil himself.

“Alexander Pierce,” the horned figure walked from the shadows as though they were a door, “You’ve put your nose where it does not belong. We can’t have that.”

“What are you?” His voice did not waver, but he certainly felt terror in his gut. Hearing about monsters and gods was quite different than facing them, Pierce was finding.

“Nothing that you’ll remember,” was his only answer, and then the devil smiled.

\-------------------------------------------------------- 

Pierce woke up at his desk at the Triskellion, papers stuck to his face with his own drool. He didn’t remember working late, but clearly he had been overworking himself. There was no reason to be looking over these files, anyway. The Thor incident had been months ago, nothing new of note.

The last few days were hazy, and his head felt fuzzy. He might be coming down with something.

He went home, vowing to take a few days off.

\-------------------------------------------------------

The few technicians still in New Mexico simply put the Winter Soldier on ice when he returned to their makeshift base, preparing his transportation back to DC. Pierce hadn’t told them why they were in the desert which was not unusual. Protocol dictated that the Asset be put in cryo as soon as possible. Wipes were only implemented when Pierce himself ordered them. 

The Winter Soldier calmly entered the tube as usual, but was restless after he had been sealed inside. The technicians nervously listened to him thrash. Normally, he was out cold within seconds.

None of them looked to see what it was that he was doing. If they had, they’d have seen his metal hand scratching at the ice creeping up the door.

The last thing the Soldier saw before the cold took him were the letters he’d etched himself.

B-U-C-K-Y.


	8. Chapter 8

They were barely outside of city limits, giant van careening along the interstate in all of its rickety glory, before Jane nearly ran them off the road. She’d been trying to work her phone and drive at the same time which was a habit that Darcy had tried everything short of violating the Geneva Conventions to break in Jane.

“We did not just narrowly escape one bloody death only to die in a fiery wreck,” Darcy lunged across the center console, trying to wrestle the phone away, “Give that to me!”

“No! I’m calling Coulson!” Jane screeched back, hunching her shoulders to block Darcy’s questing hands.

At that news, Darcy fell back into her seat, small ball of dread weighing down her stomach. She couldn’t look at Jane. “Why are you calling SHIELD?”

Jane didn’t notice how small Darcy’s voice was or how it shook. She was too busy trying to dial while simultaneously keeping an eye on the road. “Because I need to tell them that we quit,” she said, letting out a triumphant squeal as the call went through.

Darcy, still running on her adrenaline high, had the phone out of the scientist’s hands and the call cancelled before the first ring.

Jane huffed at her, sending stray fly-aways that had escaped her ponytail everywhere like a small astrophysicist Medusa.

“Quitting? We were just attacked!” Darcy was flabbergasted that she had to remind her.

Jane had the audacity to roll her eyes. Apparently, it would take more than an assassin to rate with Dr. Foster. Thinking back to her multi-hour break down after her first run in with… Bucky, Darcy was equal parts impressed and worried at how blasé her friend was being. Jane finished her Cher Horowitz impression with a spot on “So?”

“So?!” Darcy wailed, “We can’t quit after we were attacked! SHIELD can protect us!”

Jane stilled, disregarding watching the road so that she could turn her Serious Face on her passenger. “Darce, SHIELD will not protect us. It will not protect _you_ ,” she turned back to the road before continuing, “We weren’t attacked. _You_ were attacked. For all we know, it was someone in SHIELD.”

The thought of all those dead agents had Darcy putting up a token protest, but Jane was not to be deterred.

“We can’t risk it. SHIELD is powerful and completely covert. We have no idea who or what is in play. What we do know is that these are the people that disappeared Bruce Banner. The people that took Eric off to Frigga knows where. We haven’t even heard from him in months, Darce… And those are just scientists, special only because of their brain. Imagine what they might do to you? I don’t know how you got those powers or what they even are, but I’m smart enough to guess. I know what people like SHIELD could do if they knew. I won’t let them take you, too.”

Darcy’s tears had started half-way through Jane’s speech, echoes of Betty’s _‘I know what happens to special people’_ pulling at her common sense. Jane patted her on the head like a wayward puppy and held out her hand. 

Darcy gave back the phone.

\-----------------------------------------------------------

“So you’re telling me that we were attacked by an unknown assailant, we lost three agents, we know nothing about the attack because all of the camera feeds were inexplicably erased, and even though our lead researcher into interplanetary travel was, allegedly, conveniently at the Wal-mart one town over during said attack, she has still resigned?”

Fury could feel a headache brewing behind his one good eye. He wished it was anyone but Coulson in front of him because terrifying someone sounded like an excellent way to alleviate his frustrations. Sadly, he’d stopped intimidating Coulson years ago, back when Carter was still director and had sent them to Oslo for an undercover op that went FUBAR. It was hard to be scared of someone when you’ve huddled bare ass with them for warmth under a single tarp. The Oslo mission had held the unofficial title of ‘Biggest Fuck Up’ within the agency until Barton and Romanoff’s disaster in Budapest. 

“That’s what I’m saying, sir,” Coulson shrugged at Fury’s raised brow, “Right now, it’s all the information we have.”

“Then get more.”

Coulson nodded, but questioned “And how do you want to handle Dr. Foster?”

Fury sighed. “It’s been over a year, and she isn’t getting any closer to cracking that bridge. Our priority has to be Selvig’s work with the Teseract. Cut her loose, but keep eyes on her,” he said, rubbing a tired hand over his head, “What about that assistant of hers? Lewis? Could we turn her?”

“Barton’s assessment says she’s loyal to Foster.”

“An assistant’s salary isn’t much. Could we use that angle?” Fury thought aloud, but Coulson shot the idea down.

“She has family money. I don’t think she’s our play. I think hands off surveillance might be best, given our luck before. If we need to down the line, we can send someone deep cover. Boothby from Applied Science might be good for that. Level 4, physicist.”

Fury agreed, and sent Coulson out. There were bigger worries than a rogue astrophysicist. Hell, that was putting it lightly.

He looked at the records scrolling across the screen on the far wall in utter disbelief; that he could be in disbelief was a surprise in and of itself. So many years clandestinely moving chess pieces on a global scale had unconsciously made him start to think of himself as omniscient. He’d developed an ego, he realized now, an unseemly pride. Carter would have smacked him for it, and he would have deserved it.

Deserved it because here he was, king of his damn castle and blinded by his own vanity; because he was shocked, maybe even offended by what he was seeing; because his pride was wounded.

He leaned against his desk as he absorbed what he was reading. _Someone_ had authorized transport, personnel, and a large, mysterious cargo that needed what looked like an enormous power source; all of this flown to Puente Antiguo, New Mexico. Landed just before the attack on the SHIELD base, took off just after.

SHIELD had secrets upon secrets, a complicated web with what was supposed to be one puppet master: Fury. There should not be a single thing happening within his agency that he didn’t know about, that he didn’t authorize himself.

Except he never authorized this, had never fucking heard about any of this.

The only reason he was seeing any of it now was because whoever _had_ authorized all of this had made a pretty careless mistake. The action reports that had to be filled when taking out equipment of this magnitude had been initiated when leaving, but not completed when they returned. The system had flagged the unfinished paperwork and brought the abnormality straight to the top, Fury himself.

None of this should have been possible. It didn’t make a lick of sense to him, that was for damn sure. Someone was using SHIELD resources for their own agenda, and that was unacceptable. Nick Fury would find the fox in his hen house, and he’d make them bleed every secret they had.

\------------------------------------------------------------------- 

To their surprise, SHIELD had accepted Jane’s resignation with little fuss. Rather than look a gift horse in the mouth, they packed their shit, got the hell out of dodge, and ran back to Culver. Darcy still felt incredibly guilty that they were leaving New Mexico despite Jane telling her approximately three million times that they had gotten all they could from Puente Antiguo.

It was that guilt that had made her begrudgingly acquiesce to Jane’s demand that they go all Scientific Method on Darcy’s powers.

She deeply regretted that decision.

“Hold still!” Jane grabbed Darcy’s ponytail for leverage in keeping her head immobilized, “You know, if you’d let me shave your head, then we would get much better readings.”

Darcy spluttered in outrage until she saw Jane smirking in the corner of her eye. “You’re kind of a jerk, Janie-pants.”

Slapping the last electrode in place on Darcy’s forehead, Jane laughed. She went over to the EEG machine and said, “I’m just trying to get you to loosen up. You’re too jumpy.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry that being experimented on makes me nervous! This is exactly what I was trying to avoid, you know, but the mad scientist that I’ve been so afraid of turned out to be my best friend! Et tu, brute?”

“You are a ridiculous human,” Jane didn’t even look up from her calculations, “You’re not being experimented on, you big baby. You’re being observed because we don’t know enough about your abilities. Knowledge is power, so stop pouting.”

Darcy pouted. “Where's Betty? Her bedside manner is way better than yours.”

The woman in question walked in the lab at that moment, surveying the scene in front of her and sighing, “Darcy, stop pouting. I brought pizza.”

She walked up to the EEG machine and fixed one of the knobs that Jane had missed. The astrophysicist shot her an appreciative smile, but Darcy was more focused on the pizza in Betty’s hands.

Once back at Culver University, Jane had carefully fallen back into her academic life, plus one assistant. They weren’t so naïve as to assume that SHIELD had really backed off and were trying to act accordingly. Luckily, where Jane and Darcy were inexperienced with government meddling, it was old hat to Betty. They’d brought her in after Darcy had come clean about her first encounter with Bucky. Jane had taken the story in stride, but that had more to do with the fact that when Betty had reached out to Jane about Darcy taking her internship, Betty had only said Darcy needed to get out of town to escape a delicate and dangerous situation. At the time, Jane had assumed the situation was more along the lines of toxic romantic relationship and had agreed immediately. Cyborg assassins had never crossed her mind.

Now that everyone was on the same page, Betty was all too happy to help them. Darcy thought it was partly because she was a genuinely kind person and partly because the scientist in her couldn’t resist learning about the unknown. It didn’t matter; Darcy was just glad to have Betty on their team.

It had been Betty who had hooked them up with lab space under the guise of her and Jane having a joint research project on the theoretical effects of gamma radiation on Einstein-Rosen Bridges. It had been Betty who had implemented Bug Sweep Mondays, and it had been Betty who found most of the tiny microphones. Watching her pretend to be a klutz so she could spill drinks on the bugs was second only to watching a sleep deprived Jane build Napping Nests out of whatever her hands could reach.

In the end, the three of them had a pretty good gig going. They were learning about what Darcy could do and were as secure as they could hope to be given their circumstances.

While the two scientists finished their set up, Darcy tried to sneakily slink over to the pizza boxes. Problem was that no one could really be stealthy while attached to a multitude of electrodes via their face.

“No, ma’am! That is for after Science!” Jane slapped Darcy’s hand before she could grab the cheesy goodness.

Darcy pouted again.

They ignored her.

Finally, they finished with their preparations. Betty smiled at a petulant Darcy. “Alright, Darce, let ‘er rip.”

Darcy took a deep breath and screamed.

\--------------------------------------------- 

Alexander Pierce went about his business as usual. He’d managed to create one hell of a base of command for Project Insight from an old SHIELD cargo ship. HYDRA’s time in the sun was coming.

Nick Fury found his first true lead in the Lemurian Star. It was too soon to send anyone in, but it gave him enough to go on to start making plans. He was close to the bottom of this, he knew.

The Winter Soldier slept, dreaming for the first time in decades, everything red, white, and blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, THOR: THE DARK WORLD!! Although we're going to have it differ from the movie because from here on out, things are going to start living up to the AU tag
> 
> Also, I love my Lady Trio so much


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This thing was turning into an actual monster in terms of length, so I've broken up Thor: The Dark World into two chapters. Trust me, it's so much better this way.
> 
> Also bonus points to people who recognize the Galadriel "YOU WOULD HAVE A QUEEN" moment.

Darcy woke up choking on a scream. Coughing, she blinked through the tears leaking down her face to stare up at the ceiling of the small apartment. Flashes of her nightmare burned through her head: holes in the sky, flinty eyes glowing bright in the darkness, and the red liquid that floated over everything, leaving destruction in its wake.

She rolled on her side, intent on hiding her face in a pillow, but Jane was there, sitting beside her twin bed. Seeing that Darcy was fully awake, she climbed in with her and snuggled close over the blankets.

“Hey,” she whispered softly, “I heard you crying in your sleep again. Sorry I didn’t wake you up. Last time I did, getting stuck in MSS seemed to freak you out more, but I didn’t want to leave you alone.”

Darcy grabbed Jane’s hand from where it had been hovering over her and held it. “Sorry that I woke you up.” 

Jane blew a raspberry at her, and Darcy rolled her eyes. Thinking that the serious moment was over and feeling better now that the images from her nightmare had stopped their instant replays in her mind, she moved to get up out of bed, but Jane held her fast. Her friend pulled her back down to eye level again. “I’m worried about you. This has been happening a lot, these nightmares, ever since…” she swallowed before continuing, “since Norway.”

She was always painfully careful to avoid mentioning the Battle of New York, and Jane especially did not mention He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named or His radio silence for the past two years. There had been many intensive tequila and ice cream therapy sessions where they behaved more like overdramatic middle schoolers than fully grown adults in the beginning. While Darcy didn’t think Jane would ever be _okay_ with the situation, she did think Jane, with her help, was working towards being okay in general.

“I’m fine, boss lady. I’ll admit that the dreams are freaky-deaky, but they’re just dreams.” Darcy finally wrangled her hand free from Jane and crawled over her as gracefully as a girl who had just woken up from the aforementioned freaky-deaky dreams could. She moved from her little alcove of a bedroom to the kitchen for some water. Nothing like nightmares to give you cotton mouth from hell.

Jane stayed reposed on her bed, but turned to face her, propping her head up on her bent arm. “This isn’t fine, Darce. And with your gifts, they might not just be dreams. There is a prophetic aspect to what you can do, so I’m not sure we should be writing things off. Maybe we should go back to Culver. Betty is worried, too.”

Darcy glared at her from over the rim of her cup, finishing it off before she responded. 

“I swear to God, you two are the worst mother hens. We are not uprooting ourselves because I’m having bad dreams. They’re just that: dreams,” Darcy moved back to her bed and patted Jane on the shoulder, “We’re here because there were some neat atmospheric anomalies, remember? Erik was way excited about them when he called us. Even if he hasn’t actually shown up yet.”

Jane harrumphed and got up. “Fine. But if they get worse, we are either calling Betty and making her come here or going back to Culver so we can figure this out.”

“Yes, ma’am!’ Darcy responded. “Now, I have places to be, people to see.” A glance at her watch told Darcy she needed to hurry if she was going to be on time.

“What places? What people?” Jane squinted at her.

“Noneya. Especially considering your super secret ‘appointment’ today at lunch that you refuse to tell me about.”

Jane blushed and stammered on her way across the living to her own bedroom. Darcy was pretty sure she knew what the so-called appointment was; mostly because when she was changing Jane’s ringtone earlier to a ridiculous rap song that she knew would drive her friend crazy, a text from someone named Richard came through. The message had one too many emojis to be platonic. Darcy really hoped that the secrecy was because Jane was nervous about liking this guy and not because she was trying to force herself into moving on too quickly.

But that was a mystery for another time. For now, she had a mission to complete.

\---------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy had met Ian in their first week in London at the Caffé Nero down the street from their apartment. The place was actually Jane’s mom’s home, but she’d decided to Eat, Pray, Love it months before and had closed up her apartment while she toured the world. They’d been cleaning out the place for two days straight and still hadn’t gotten rid of all the cobwebs. After the dusting the third shelf full of very pretty but very dirty crystals, Darcy came to the conclusion that Jane’s mom was a total hippie. Darcy teased Jane with the numerous horoscope clippings and astrology charts, but Jane had answered that it was her mom’s love of the stars that had sparked her own interest. 

Upon discovering there was an entire closet they had missed stuffed to the ceiling with musty boxes, Darcy had declared she needed more coffee before touching it and had headed out to grab some. She’d been in line to order when the dude had caught her eye. He’d been wearing a knit hat that was an exact replica of Jayne’s from Firefly, and it was such a majestic sight that she had abandoned her position in line to go over and ask about it.

Ian had blushed bright red and fumbled awkwardly when she smiled at him, and she had decided she was adopting him on the spot. She’d seen him every once and a while since then at the same spot, although he’d swapped the Jayne hat for a regular old beanie along the way, and they’d chat. She saw that he was studying notes on infrared astronomy early on because she was nosy with a tendency to read over shoulders. The easiest way to adopt him became clear: use him as slave labor and hire an intern.

Unfortunately, he was oddly reluctant to join the cause. Darcy was pretty sure that he was just playing hard to get because he totally fangirled when she name dropped Jane. He might not know it yet, but she was going to win him over if it was the last thing she did. He actually knew Science!, bonus points for it being Jane’s flavor of Science!, and Darcy thought it would only help Jane’s happiness if she had someone to really talk about her work. As much as she loved Jane and was smart in her own right, the things Dr. Foster liked to talk about were above Darcy’s head.

It was with this mentality that she entered the coffee shop, spotting Ian in his customary seat in the corner. He grinned when he noticed her walking up to him, opening his mouth to presumably greet her but she slapped a hand over it before he could get anything out.

“Today, you are going to listen to all the reasons that you will be my intern and at the end of my speech, you will excitedly accept the position. There is no other option here.”

She removed her hand, sat down across from him, and began.

\--------------------------------------------- 

Richard had not been what Darcy was expecting when she’d pinged Jane’s cell phone to find her. She wouldn’t have done it, but the machines were going crazy. Ian, who actually knew what the hell the machines did, had gone bug eyed at the readings they were giving, so Darcy made the executive decision to date crash.

She may have also been the teensiest bit curious.

Richard had been nice enough and (Darcy had been close enough to hear his banging a lot of dudes comment) pretty funny, but he’d still been a bit boring. Admittedly, the Norse God of Thunder was a tough act to follow.

Also, Darcy definitely though it was a little weird that he mistook a girl in a heavy coat, scarf, and beanie as the waiter, but whatevs.

Even with all of his nondescript, unassuming charm, Jane was clearly still gun shy. It broke Darcy’s heart, but she was sure the only thing that would heal Jane’s own was time.

Jane may have been short with her on the car ride over to the anomaly, but Darcy could see the relief in the sag of her shoulders. Darcy could take the blame if it meant Jane wasn’t pushing herself when she wasn’t yet ready.

Ian popped forward from the backseat like a deranged prairie dog with the GPS to direct Darcy. Jane reacted like an actual deranged prairie dog had attacked her, which Darcy thought a little much. She was so startled that she couldn’t even absorb Ian’s heart eyes when he said how honored he was to be working with her. 

Rolling her eyes, Darcy turned left.

“I have totally mastered driving in London,” she said over the echoes of car horns.

\------------------------------- 

Darcy felt it the second Jane went from being just down the hall to being… gone. It was something she had been working on with Jane and Betty, that supernatural awareness of souls or life forces or whatever term worked with your belief system. It had become background noise to her after months of practice, but the sudden absence of Jane’s brought the sense to the forefront.

She tore up the stairs, shoving kids out of the way to run towards where she had last felt Jane. Panic was clawing it’s way up her chest, but she took comfort in the fact that Jane wasn’t dead, just gone. Although, disappearing out of thin air was still panic inducing in and of itself. The hallway was a dead end.

Ian came to stop behind her, heaving and bent over. “Darcy? What’s the matter?”

“Jane’s gone.”

Ian straightened, having caught his breath, and moved to stand beside her. He joined her in staring at the wall at the end of the hallway. “What do you mean she’s gone? She ran up here, but she must have just turned another way.”

Darcy took a step towards the wall. It was impossible, but she swore that she felt a breeze coming from the plaster. She put a hand up to touch it, but the air just above the wall wavered like a television losing signal. 

“Intern! Did you see that?” she called out behind her.

“See what? It’s just a wall.”

There was something just before the wall. She could see it clear as day now that she knew it was there, a perfect circle where the air wasn’t as crisp as it should be. Jane wasn’t here, but Darcy could still feel her. It was a confusing sensation like she was in two places at once. The familiar burn of Jane’s energy felt like it was billions of miles away, but also like it was just beyond the hazy circle. Darcy didn’t know how to get billions of miles away, so she took the more expedient route.

Turning around to face Ian, she tossed him a quick “Sorry for this,” and took a step backwards as he gaped.

Her feet touched on solid rock, the footsteps echoing in a huge cavern.

“Darcy? Oh, thank God,” came Jane’s relieved voice through the darkness. She was kneeling before an ominously glowing statue thing. Darcy moved towards her, but stopped after a few steps.

“Get away from that, Jane.” Darcy was finding it hard to focus on her friend. Her gaze kept wandering back to the statue, or, more accurately, to the familiar red light inside, though it took a second to place it. It was the red liquid of her nightmares, the one that turned everything to darkness.

 _‘Except that’s not all it was’_ a corner of Darcy’s mind whispered to her with a voice much deeper than her own, _‘Take it for yourself and find out.’_

Jane was talking to her, but Darcy couldn’t hear her. She’d started forwards again, mind filled with visions of herself with glowing red eyes and worlds at her feet.

It was the image of all of the dead men, women, children, by her hands that shook Darcy out of her trance. Her hand was outstretched to the cracked stone, the red liquid almost to her fingertips.

Darcy stumbled away, horrified at herself. Jane moved to catch her, and braced herself on the stone to stand. The red light, with Darcy no longer available, latched onto the nearest thing: Jane. 

Jane screamed as it pushed under her skin and up her arm, scratching at her flesh to get it out. Darcy was frozen in fear. Jane swayed, and fell, eyes rolling back in her head.

Darcy caught her before she hit the ground, trying to shake her awake. She could feel whatever that was, that red glowing liquid, brimming under Jane’s skin, but it no longer sang to her with its siren call. Looking around them, Darcy did her best not to let the super creepy abandoned mega-cathedral vibe send her into hysterics.

She had to get Jane back to Earth, which she didn’t need her abilities to know they were absolutely not on, and drummed up the meditation techniques that Betty had taught her. Their little Trio had done a lot of testing with her abilities, and the results had indicated that Darcy could potentially do more than just travel between MSS and one spot. Betty theorized that it was like any other skill that required practice, so she had invested a lot of time in mentoring Darcy on things to help focus her thoughts and emotions.

Darcy channeled her breathing and pictured her mind casting out a net, feeling for any spots like before, perfect circles of strange air. 

She found nothing. Sitting down, she maneuvered Jane so that her head and torso were cradled in Darcy’s lap. Her eyelids were fluttering which Darcy took as a good sign, although she hoped it didn’t mean nightmares. She thought of this morning in Jane’s mom’s cozy little apartment and of how comfortable her tiny bed was despite it’s size and of the stupid leaky faucet they still hadn’t fixed in the kitchen and of the barista at Nero’s who knew her order now and of that cute kid who was dumb enough to think they were cops and of poor Ian who was probably scared out of his nerdy little mind because she had walked through a freaking wall…

And suddenly, Darcy found herself falling through the floor with Jane safely in her arms.

Or rather, the floor was moving through her. The whole cave was moving farther and farther away from them, all the while she remained sitting cross legged, lap full of unconscious astrophysicist. Darcy kept calm, chest rising and falling evenly, even as stars and comets and fucking planets faded in and out all around them. Darcy didn’t dare move a muscle throughout the whole process, not until they were sitting in the hallway where they started, as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened.

“There’s no place like home, I guess,” Darcy whispered to herself, trembling.

\---------------------------------------------- 

How could he have blown his first real op so thoroughly?

While it was true that he wasn’t a field agent, that should have no bearing on his immense failure. Ian had been thrilled when he was awarded this assignment, not to mention flattered beyond words that it had been the legendary Agent Coulson who had recommended him. It was a chance to collaborate with Dr. Foster on what was, in his opinion, the most revolutionary work ever done in the field of astrophysics.

He had taken his duty quite seriously, had studied all the manuals on espionage that SHIELD had to offer, and had barraged the Level 4 specialists of his acquaintance with a veritable deluge of questions, all in the name of proving himself worthy of such a mission.

Yet here he was, first day of complete infiltration, and _he had lost them like a set of car keys_.

Not even the adventures that Fitzsimmons had shared with him via heavily redacted emails had recounted such personal disasters. At least, not ones where they were the culpable party, but in this, Ian could only blame himself.

He could not even accurately describe where the women had disappeared to because how does one explain a human fading into a solid wall?

With the weight of his situation hanging from his neck, he called SHIELD to report his sins.

They were there within the hour, a small team searching the area thoroughly. He was busy being interrogated via Facetime with Commander Hill herself, nearly soiling his pants with the stress of it all, when a large boom had him ducking for cover.

He was blinded by a tunnel of bright light which evaporated to reveal Thor himself. Ian did soil his pants a bit then.

Everyone launched into action, scurrying towards the Thunder God, but he seemed unaware of them, his eyes scanning the perimeter before striding through the agents to enter the building.

“Jane!” he bellowed into the cavernous room where they had floated the lorry just hours earlier, “Jane! Where are you?”

Ian was about to interrupt to inform him that they were all trying to answer that very question before a high, nasally voice echoed from above.

“We’re up here!”

None of the agents could have been expected to keep pace with an Asgardian, but many gave it a valiant effort. As it was, by the time they found Thor and the missing women in question at the very site of their disappearance, Darcy and Thor were playing a gentle yet intense game of tug-of-war with the body of an alarmingly comatose Dr. Foster.

“Should we send for a medic?” Ian asked an agent next to him, but was given no response. Rude.

Thor was speaking calmly to Darcy, but there was a flint about his eyes that made Ian nervous.

“She will receive the best care in Asgard; this, I promise you. Simply release her, and she shall receive attention all the sooner.”

“Listen, buddy,” Darcy, who was still crouched on the ground with most of Dr. Foster’s body weight on her legs and her arms wrapped around the doctor, “She is not going anywhere without me. You don’t get to come in here and throw out orders like it’s your job!”

“It is my job, Darcy. I am a prince if you’ll recall.”

“Not prince over me or Janie! She’s not going without me!”

“I cannot simply take you to Asgard! Cease this bickering and let me take her!”

“Like hell I will! Also, as you so charmingly mentioned, you’re the damn prince! You can take me, and you goddamn will!”

Thor sighed, his body armor shuddering at the violent expulsion of air. “If it will get Jane there, then alright. We shall go together. Let me carry her outside, you are not as strong of body as you are of tongue.”

“No sweat of my back, pal,” Darcy muttered as she relinquished her hold on Jane’s chest.

A decisive “Move,” from Thor had SHIELD personnel parting to make way for them, and once outside, they disappeared in that same tunnel of light.

A furious “What the fuck is going on over there?” emanating from his hand reminded him that he was still on the video call with Commander Hill. 

Ian went white.

“Um.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Couple of things:  
> 1) Surprise, this is getting posted much earlier than usual because I've cut down the movie again. There's so much stuff to get to, and I like to keep chapters within a certain word range so here we are.  
> 2) Please, for the love of Thor, do not expect all updates to be this fast. They won't be and it'll just lead to disappointment for both you and me.  
> 3) I have a headcanon that Bifrost travel is not instantaneous and instead takes a few minutes, so you have people awkwardly shifting and avoiding eye contact like in elevators only without the terrible elevator music to save them.

Jane came to somewhere beside a big red planet. Her eyes were huge, befitting someone who had suddenly woken up in a rainbow bridge hurtling through space. They got bigger when she realized who was holding her in the tree trunks he called arms.

She didn’t look away from Thor, who for his part was staring as intently, as she asked, “Darcy?”

Darcy had been sticking her hand in and out of the Bifrost light much to Thor’s horror. He’d desperately exclaimed that she was “going to lose a finger, stop this instant, Darcy, please, what are you doing?!”, but she turned at Jane’s voice, anxious to see her friend awake.

“Yeah, Janie?”

“What did you do?” Jane asked while raising a hand to boop Thor on the nose. Darcy thought there were much more interesting places to touch him for a reality check, but to each their own.

“Why do you assume this is my fault?” Darcy asked, indignant.

“Because I was unconscious, so it couldn’t have been me.”

“Then let’s blame Thor. It could be his fault, theoretically.”

Thor shot her a scandalized glare, the scandal being that she would bad mouth him to his lady love. He may have been gone for two years, but from what Darcy had seen in the five minutes he’d been back in their lives, the dude was as lovesick for Jane as ever. Good. He may be an alien warrior, but Darcy could take him. For Jane.

She was saved from blame by their arrival in Asgard. Thor stumbled a bit with Jane in his hold, but Darcy didn’t so much as sway, steadily stepping into the brilliantly gilded room. It was the fanciest observatory she’d ever seen, even though it held no telescope.

They were greeted by a beautiful man with eyes as gold as the walls. “Welcome to Asgard.”

The sound of a slap was his only response. The stranger looked taken aback, but Darcy thought that a slap was Jane restraining himself. Not wanting front row seats to the lover’s quarrel, she held out her hand to the man. “Darcy Lewis. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Heimdall,” he introduced himself, grasping her forearm in the same strange embrace the Warriors Three had used with her back in New Mexico. He continued with a smile once he’d released her. “The pleasure is all mine. I confess that I am honored to meet another of my kind.”

Darcy blinked at him. “Um. Sorry. What?”

Heimdall cocked his head at her, speaking slowly. “Another who can go beyond the walls between worlds. It is a rare thing to possess the ability; we are few and far between. Surely you can recognize me for what I am as well as I can you. Although, I cannot fathom how you came to be on Midgard.”

“Born there,” Darcy’s voice was faint, the floor tilting beneath her feet. Or at least, that was how it felt. She tried to smile, but it was too bright by half. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She skirted away from him, now wary of his unnatural eyes and what they could see. “Jane?” she called.

No answer. A quick glance showed that her boss’ tongue was getting reacquainted with Thor’s own.

“My lady, I meant no offense. ‘Tis a great thing to meet others like yourself, I was merely happy at the opportunity.” Heimdall held his hands aloft, as nonthreatening as he could make himself. “Please, do not be uneasy.”

It all only strengthened her need to escape.

She went over to try and yank Jane away from her lip lock, but she was thrown clear across the room by a red blast before she ever made contact.

There was a sharp blow to her temple and then a blessed blackness.

\--------------------------------------- 

Darcy woke to a throbbing head and shouting voices.

She cracked an eye and saw a one eyed Santa arguing with Jane and Thor.

Well, this time she was the one who’d been unconscious, so this one was definitely on Jane.

\---------------------------------------

“…called doctors, let them deal with it. Guards! Take her back to Midgard!” Odin ordered, thinking the matter handled. Thor would be over his infatuation if he would just leave the girl where she belonged.

“Woah,” Odin and the guards were interrupted by a voice from a table in the back of the room that they hadn’t realized was occupied, “doctors won’t be able to do jack shit about the red mist of death in her, St. Nick.”

He didn’t bother casting a glance at the other girl, infuriated beyond reason with by his son’s actions.

“It wasn’t enough to sully the halls of Asgard with one mortal, you had to bring two?” Odin thundered.

The woman still scoffed, “Excuse me? Mortal?”

Odin deigned to look upon the presumptuous Midgardian. She must be presumptuous to be so offended at his natural condescension at her race, but a second explanation for her sneering presented itself with closer observation.

For it was clear that she was no mortal.

“My son,” Odin murmured, “What have you brought upon us?”

“Father,” Thor began, but he held up a hand to silence his son.

The girl, her youth was clear despite her other mysteries, sat up from the bed, wincing as she placed a hand to her head. She stood and walked forward, but his guards drew their swords.

She screamed, just a small yelp really, but it was enough. Odin would recognize that stench of magic anywhere. He drew his own weapon.

“I was unaware Mephisto had sired an heir,” he spit, “But I suppose it was only a matter of time. A king needs a successor to the throne after all, even if it is the throne to hell.”

The she-demon had been focused on the swords pointed at her, but at his utterance of Mephisto’s name, spun her wide eyes back to him. He heard Jane Foster whisper an “Oh, Darcy,” from behind him, but he didn’t dare turn away.

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are, Patches, but I am no daughter of Mephisto. Impossible,” she forced through gritted teeth.

He let out a derisive laugh at her denial because even as she spoke, he could smell the smoky scent of magic, the same that King of Hell himself evoked, coating her every word. “I am the All-Father, Odin, son of Bor, King of Asgard. Which you would well know as any child of Mephisto’s would. Why did he send you? To gather information? To do harm?”

Odin advanced, staff aloft, with every question, a sight that had brought many a warrior to their knees. 

Alas, she did not falter. Instead, the demoness clenched her fists and raised her chin, eyes full of anger and, surprisingly, tears.

“King of Asgard, huh? Big fucking whoop. I am Darcy Lewis,” she stepped closer, bringing the point of his staff directly over her heart, “I am the daughter of Diane Lewis and Diane Lewis, _only_. I was raised by her, loved by her, fucking blessed with her as my mother until Mephisto killed her, took her from me. That demon is no family of mine, so back the fuck off.”

The girl was shaking. Standing tall, but every part of her trembling. Whether it was from rage or fear, Odin knew not. What he did know was that her words rang with righteous truth. Mephisto could make lies sound like the truth, he was well know for it, but he did so by drenching the words in a sickening sweetness so as to entice. This girl before him had made no such cloying attempt. Her words were filled only with a bone deep sorrow.

Sorrow, Odin also knew.

He put down his staff, hearing the guards follow his lead with their swords. He cast a look to Thor, finding his son restraining a struggling Jane Foster. Thor, his ever maturing heir, would not bring a threat into his home. He obviously trusted the two women.

“It matters little that you do not claim Mephisto as family. He is still your father,” Odin sighed, “I cannot allow you to stay in our realm. The guards shall escort Jane Foster and yourself to the Bifrost.”

Thor protested, “Jane needs the attention of our healers. The illness she bears is not of Midgard. It is not like anything I have ever seen.”

“That is not the concern of Asgard.” Odin was resolute.

“If what you say is true,” the demoness, Darcy as she’d been called, began softly, “and I’m Mephisto’s daughter, then you can’t just throw us out.”

“And why not?” he challenged.

“You said it yourself: Mephisto is a king in his own right which would make me a,” she seemed to choke on the word, “princess. Of Hell, but still a princess. I was invited and brought here by the Crown Prince of Asgard. By like any diplomatic code on my world, I and mine should be treated with respect and hospitality. Hospitality would also include aid in the event of sickness.”

Odin could see the family resemblance in that moment as clearly as he could see that her hair was auburn. Mephisto and his deals, his way with words…

“For someone who does not claim the Lord of Hell as family, you seem very well versed in the ways of court,” Odin observed.

“She has a degree in political science, you know. This is her area of expertise,” said Jane Foster, showing admirable loyalty, but unbearably smug.

Odin looked to his son, who had his arms still wrapped around the mortal. Thor did not blink, met his stare all the while carefully cradling Jane Foster to him, tenderly like a bear holding a dove.

“You are clever beyond your years, Lady Darcy. I hope that will not be my undoing.” Odin waved for the healers to continue their work, signaled for the guards, and left the room without looking back.

\-------------------------------------------------------------- 

“Agent, for the sixth time, you don’t need to know Selvig’s favorite brand of chocolate or what movies he watched as a kid! You just need to say that you are Ian Selvig, flash the ID we made you, and say that you’re there to pick him up!”

“What if they ask me about him?! If I’m to be a believable son to this man, then I should know something about him!”

Clint threw his hands in the air and growled in frustration. The kid was trying to make up for losing his targets, he could understand that, but Jesus H. Christ. It was go time, and Boothby was insisting on a more thorough file on Selvig so he could _get into character_. Clint was three seconds from beating him into character.

“It’s the night shift. Whoever is manning the desk is not going to ask you shit because it would cut into their nap time. Get in there before I throw you through the door ass-first,” Clint threatened, deadly still.

Boothby’s mouth was thin, but he squared his shoulders and went inside.

“Fucking finally,” Clint grumbled to himself. This was supposed to be his off week, but Thor showing up and taking Dr. Foster and Darcy off world took priority over his vacation. 

Unfortunately.

Not only because he was looking forward to passing out on the couch with Lucky, but also because he’d had a personal mission set up for the week: Natasha.

He pulled out his phone, hitting speed dial three and leaning against the parked car as he waited for her to pick up.

The wait wasn’t long. “Romanoff.”

“Hey, Nat.”

“Hold on, let me put you on hold,” there was muffled crunch in the background, “Sorry. What’s up, bird brain?”

“Am I missing lamb night?” His mouth watered at the thought of Nat’s cooking; lamb with that minty stuff was his favorite.

There was the ding of an oven in the background. “Want me to lie to you?” came Natasha’s amused reply.

“Dammit. This sucks. I love lamb night.”

“If I were a lesser woman, I’d think you were only my friend for the food.”

“It’s definitely a factor,” he sighed, dreaming of more than the carry out from the nearest fast food place that would surely be his dinner.

She tsk’ed at him.

“Seriously, though. You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I have not. You’d know if I was avoiding you,” she said, quick knife work echoing over the phone.

“Exactly, I would know. I mean, I do know. I haven’t seen you in over two months, and you’re holed up in DC of all places. I hear you’ve even been set up with a nice office at the Triskelion. Since when does anyone on Strike Team Delta need a desk?”

He heard her blow out a tiny puff of air, could picture the minute flaring of her nostrils. It was the only tell the Black Widow had, and she only let it show off the clock. It had taken years before she’d finally let her guard down enough for him to pick up on it. He wasn’t naïve enough to think it wasn’t on purpose, and he felt the weight of the trust it showed. He did his best to be worthy of that trust.

“Something’s going on, Nat, and it’s big enough that you’ve distanced yourself from me: your bestie forevz,” Clint cajoled. Humor was often the best bet to get her to open up. It was one of the few things the Red Room hadn’t trained against. Why would they because who would joke in the face of certain death?

They clearly had never come across a Barton, that’s for damn sure.

“Fury’s running something. He thinks he’s being covert, but it’s not a big leap when you’re the one who is actually doing his dirty work,” she finally said.

Clint was suddenly glad for the clean phones that Stark had foisted on all of them after New York. “If Fury’s spooked, it’s gotta be big.”

“I don’t know yet. He has me working with Rogers.”

Clint had to laugh at that. “He’s got you working Rogers, you mean. That can’t be fun. Captain America is so earnest. Anyone would feel bad pulling a fast one on the embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way.”

“I am forever reminding you that I’m Russian.”

Clint spied a maniacal looking Erik Selvig exiting the building, Boothby in tow with some wicked looking mechanical spikes and a giant bag of pills.

“I know you are. Have fun playing spy games, I’ve gotta go wrestle a scientist. You need me to fly out to you after I’m done here?”

“No, stay away. Better that one of us is clear in case shit hits the fan.”

“I hate it when you have all the fun without me,” Clint said and hung up before he could be overheard. He reminded himself that Nat could handle anything.

\-------------------------------------------------------- 

Darcy wasn’t invited to the super secret meeting about the ancient power inhabiting her best friend. She wanted to be mad about it because she was pretty sure Odin was only barring her on the off chance she was a spy, but she’s pretty sure she got the better end of the deal.

Frigga poured her more of the sweet smelling drink that may or may not be mead (she hadn’t asked and it’s not like she’s ever had mead before for Christ’s sake), and Darcy knew drinking with the Queen of Asgard was definitely the better deal.

“This is seriously delicious. M’lady. Or your highness. Or majesty?” Darcy cringed into her goblet, taking a bigger gulp.

“Frigga is fine,” she laughed, “And I thank you. Asgard is known for more than war; although, people often forget. I thought you might like something strong after the showdown with my husband.”

The flush Darcy felt wasn’t only from the probably-mead. She desperately wished she had paid more attention to those etiquette classes Diane had forced her to attend. What did you say to an alien queen about arguing with her husband?

“Um. He started it?” she tried.

“He usually does,” Frigga whispered, a twinkle in her eye. “Though I hope I am not too forward in asking you who trained you in your magic if you have not known Mephisto?”

Darcy tried to ignore the mention of Mephisto. If she ignored him, the specter of him, then it wasn’t real.

Except that the back of her mind kept replaying what Odin had said, over and over.

She’d been an idiot, a stupid, infantile girl, about everything. One day she wakes up with powers, actual verified superpowers, and she what? Never questioned why? Just accepted the moronic idea that they were a weird side effect from a demon contract?

She’d been so caught up with controlling and exploring them, so focused on ‘dealing with her shit’ that she never even thought to ask what having the powers meant. They could only mean one thing: she wasn’t human. Not really. Not completely.

And if she wasn’t human, then where had the Other in her come from?

Simple logic, and she’d never spared a single thought about it.

A warm fingertip wiped a tear from her cheek, bring Darcy back to the present and out of her spiraling thoughts. Frigga was now seated next to her, a slender and solid arm around her back with one hand clearing the wet trails from her face. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying.

“I’m sorry, little one. It was insensitive to mention his name,” Frigga cooed softly.

Darcy knew it was a trick of her mind, an unconscious yearning, but Frigga smelled exactly like the perfume Diane had worn her whole life. She found herself leaning into the queen, burying her face in her neck, hiccupping with her sobs.

“Shh, it will be alright, shh.” Frigga rubbed her back, rocking slightly.

It helped. After a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: LOKI. Also a metric shit ton of other stuff, but I feel like everyone loves a Darcy and Loki face off.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this is woefully under-edited. But I am out of the country on vacation and wanted to just get this out to y'all so there wouldn't be a two week delay.
> 
> I will come back later to try and fix anything that is glaring, so if you see any horrific mistake, PLEASE TELL ME AND SAVE ME THE EMBARRASSMENT

Darcy awoke to the creak of a door. Stilling in fright at the unfamiliar room, it took a moment before she remembered she was in an Asgardian suite ‘befitting her status’ according to Frigga. Apparently her status meant animal pelts, silks, and a sunken fire pit. She hoped the latter came with all of the visiting royals suites and wasn’t just a jab at her whole Princess of Hell thing. Frigga didn’t strike her as the type to be cruel.

She was relieved to discover it was only Jane creeping ineptly across the room, Jane’s familiar energy washing over her.

“You know Thor’s room is down the hall, right?”

Her question nearly startled Jane into the roasting embers of the aforementioned pit. “Jesus Christ, you scared me!”

Darcy sat up, squinting without her glasses. “I’m not the one breaking and entering, boss.”

Jane made it to the bed safely, taking a running leap to hoist herself up and clawing her way through the furs. “I’m not breaking and entering, you butt. I’m checking on you. I tried to get away earlier, but Odin really loves to hear himself talk.” She made a gagging noise.

“You can’t talk about your future father-in-law like that,” Darcy yawned.

“Yes, I can. He made you cry, so I hate him. It’s the rule.”

“Like how I hate your ex, Donald, even though I’ve never met him and all of his facebook albums are of his Doctors Without Borders missions?”

“Yes,” Jane nodded sagely, “Exactly like that. We are excellent rule followers. But back to my point: making sure you’re okay. Although, I have to admit that you seem better than I expected you would be…”

Darcy recognized the statement for the question it was and answered accordingly.

“I’m not okay. But I’m pretty sure that I cried out all the saline in my body. Embarrassingly, I cried it all out on Frigga. We may hate your future father-in-law, but we kind of idolize your future mother-in-law.”

“How did that happen?” Jane settled into the bed, rolling on her stomach.

“She got me tipsy on Asgardian mead.”

“What?” Jane sounded shocked, “Thor said that stuff was way too strong for humans, that we couldn’t handle it.”

Darcy looked down at her lap, playing with the fur. “Well, Janie, I’m not human, remember?” she huffed.

Jane was there in an instant, pulling Darcy into her lap.

“You listen to me. You’re human, Darcy Lewis. Just because you found out that Me…” Jane felt her tense at the name, but kept on, “that Mephisto gave you some chromosomes doesn’t make you any different than who you were before you knew. You’re still you, and you’re still human; you’ve just got a little extra.”

“The devil is my dad, Jane. What does that say about me?” Darcy cried.

“Nothing,” Jane pet her hair, “It doesn’t say a damn thing about you. You’re a good person. A good person who keeps me sane, who raced to save a stranger from an assassin, who went toe to toe with the King of Asgard to help her friend.”

“To help my best friend,” Darcy corrected, hugging Jane.

“Best friend,” Jane agreed.

They enjoyed the silence until she ruined it with an “I’m kind of awesome, huh?”.

\-------------------------------------- 

Darcy wasn’t thrilled at having twenty four hour protection again, especially since it was really Odin keeping tabs on her, but at least the guards could tell her how to get to the Bifrost. After a night’s rest and a clearer head, it was apparent that an apology was owed to Heimdall. Following the yellow brick road, or in this case the rainbow glass bridge, it struck Darcy that she was truly on an alien planet.

It had been a whirlwind since she stepped through that portal after Jane between worrying over her friend and identity challenging revelations, there hadn’t been a chance to process the enormity of her situation. She was a twenty four year old mostly human girl on a totally different world.

As light glinted off the spirals of the city and water rushed over the cliff into an abyss (Was Asgard flat? She’d have to ask Thor), she let out an incredulous giggle.

It was so _cool_.

Her giggling caught the attention of Heimdall who was standing sentry in the observatory, hand resting lightly on his sword.

Darcy should also ask Thor about getting herself a sword.

“Your highness,” Heimdall greeted her with a small bow. It was hard to tell because of their strange color, but his eyes seemed amused.

She played along, gave a silly curtsy back, and said “So I owe you an apology.”

Heimdall abandoned his post to stand with her on the bridge in the sunshine. “No, my lady, it is I who should apologize. I had not realized that your abilities were a secret. If I had known, I would have shown more discretion.”

“Don’t worry about it, my man. You were just being a friendly person, and I totally spazzed out.”

“Thor mentioned that you had an entertaining way with language,” he laughed, “I am glad to find he was not exaggerating.”

Darcy decided to make herself comfortable and sat down on the ledge of the bridge, dangling her feet over the crashing waves. She heard a horrified gasp from a guard, but Heimdall simply joined her, his long legs swaying in the breeze next to hers.

“I’m a little scared that Thor has been telling stories about me. The first time we met wasn’t exactly my best moment.”

“The way he tells it, you bested him with his own element. There could be no greater accolade from the Prince.”

She should have guessed that warriors would see it that way.

“Is that how you knew who I was? Or what I was, I mean. Thor told you?”

“No, he did not tell me that you were anything but a Midgardian. Thor would not divulge the secrets of a friend,” Heimdall frowned, “I knew you for what you were from the moment I saw you. Those of us who are able to pierce the walls between worlds are… distinctive.”

Darcy leaned back on her hands, considering. She tilted her face up to the sun. “What do you mean by ‘those of us’? Is there a club or something?”

“No. There are not enough of us to form any sort of guild. But we all can traverse the worlds in different ways. For example, I can see all, no matter the distance. I still need the Bifrost to travel to other worlds, though.”

Darcy thought of MSS and of floating through space with an unconscious Jane.

“I can…” she swallowed, trying to order her thoughts, “I scream or hum. When I do that, I either see visions or I ...teleport, I guess? I don’t know. I just end up in another place. Usually, it’s a dark, foggy place that I call MSS. Yesterday, though, I took Jane and me back to Earth from wherever we found the Aether. I didn’t even know I could do that.”

Heimdall looked thoughtful. “This place, MSS, could you show me? I don’t recall ever seeing such a place.”

“Um,” she blinked, “Sure? I mean, if you think it will work from Asgard.”

“I think you’ll find that which world will make little difference to you, Lady Darcy,” he smiled.

“Ok, gimme your hand.”

He obliged, and there, holding hands with the Guardian of Asgard, she screamed.

\--------------------------------------- 

Heimdall had never seen anything like it, and for someone who had lived as long as he had and had eyes like his, that was an unprecedented event. He slowly circled, taking in as much of the realm as he could with those same eyes.

The young princess stood to the side, chewing on her lip and wringing her hands.

“My lady,” he began, still in awe, “Do you understand what your MSS is?”

“No,” she said, as serious as he had yet seen her, “I really do not.”

It was a marvel to Heimdall that someone with so much power could be so unaware of the strength they possessed.

“This is the realm between the living and the dead. There are ancient tales of it, tales older than even Asgard’s long history, of the shadows the dead must pass through to reach the afterlife. It is thought that only the dead could reach it and yet...” he ran a hand through the mist surrounding them, stunned, “I do not understand why or how you can access this place, for what connection could you have with the dead?”

Lady Darcy knit her brows at him before snorting like an angered bilgesnipe. “Oh, right I didn’t explain the visions! My bad! I see dead people and like, how they die and stuff. Forgot to mention that part,” she said with a shrug.

Heimdall gaped.

\------------------------------------- 

One of the best acquisitions Mephisto had ever made was around two thousand years ago, give or take a century, in what was now China. The man was a famed physician of the time, due to the healing abilities Mephisto had bestowed upon him in exchange for his soul. The physician was especially known for the miracles he could work on aching muscles and joints with his massages.

It is a little known fact that being the King of Hell was almost more stress than it was worth. What with all the souls to be ruled and the demons to be ordered about and don’t even get him started on the constant touring for more deals to make. Mephisto may seem like a carefree devil, but stress was the enemy of every man. It was this stress, and the knots it gave him, that made the physician so invaluable. His massages kept Mephisto limber as a Romanian competing for gymnastic gold.

For his massage time to be disturbed, hell truly had to be frozen over. Mephisto had been very clear about this which is why it was so troubling when an urgent knocking interrupted his appointment.

He sent his masseuse away.

The arbitrator of this massage disruption entered the room nervously. Mephisto didn’t bother getting up from his table and waited. The small demon gulped and began with a stutter, “M-My Lord, Darcy Lewis is no longer on Earth.”

“She’s my daughter,” Mephisto huffed irritably, “and likely can travel between worlds as freely as I can. I’d imagine she’s frequently not on Earth.”

“Yes, Lord, but it’s where she is that’s important,” the servant said.

That gave Mephisto pause. “Are you going to make me guess?” he drawled, lighting a ring of fire around the lesser demon, letting the flames lick his heels.

“Ah, no, sir,” the servant spluttered, “Our sources have her in Asgard! She’s staying at the palace!”

Mephisto saw red.

\--------------------------------- 

Darcy was playing with her new dagger, a beautiful little thing that she and Thor had compromised on after he refused her request for a sword (something about being untrained), when Frigga and Jane burst through the door.

Frigga grabbed her by the arm and dragged her with Jane to a small hidden room.

“What’s going on?” Darcy warily asked.

Jane answered first, shifting from foot to foot. “We’re under attack.”

“It’ll be fine,” Frigga promised, “Just stay in here, stay hidden.”

Darcy didn’t love the implication that they would be alone. “What about you?”

Frigga smirked, eyes sharp and showing too many teeth. “You’re not the only one with magic, dear,” she crowed, while a perfect replica of Jane appeared out of thin air next to her. Darcy knew it wasn’t real, could sense that it was a lifeless copy, but it was impressive nonetheless.

“Um,” Jane squeaked.

\------------------------- 

A few short minutes later, Darcy felt the familiar itch at the back of her throat. She let out a quiet hum and cursed at what she saw.

“Darcy?” Jane questioned.

“Stay here,” she took a step to the door, “I have to go.”

Jane stopped her before she could slip out. “I’m going with you!” she demanded.

“No, you aren’t,” Darcy knew what would happen if she did, still in that omniscient headspace, “Jane if they get the Aether, it’s game over for the whole universe. Trust me, you have to stay here.”

“Okay,” Jane cried, “Okay.”

Darcy ran.

\---------------------------------------- 

Frigga was being restrained by a white haired dude, the same one that had been haunting Darcy’s nightmares for months, while a towering, charred figure pulled back his blade to gut the queen.

Darcy was really not great at planning ahead. She never had been, always having been more of a roll with it kind of chick. Faced with evil space elves, she stayed true to herself and jumped in head first.

Well, dagger first.

She leapt at the bigger one’s back, driving her weapon into his neck and feeling the flesh give, followed quickly by all of her body weight slamming into him to knock him over. Sadly, UFC fighter Darcy was not, so she tumbled over with him.

From under her, the guy swatted away her dagger like a splinter with one hand and gripped her arm with the other. His fingers tightened on her elbow until Darcy felt it shatter, the bones crumbling under her skin. The pain ripped a scream from her, and the familiar, soothing dark of MSS loomed just outside her vision.

Except it never came.

Instead, a burning hand was wrapped around her neck, throttling until her voice cut out.

A lack of oxygen brought a burst of colors to her eyes, but the last ones she saw were the crimson of Thor’s cape and the gold of his hair.

She was thrown aside like a dirty rag, hitting a stone column with enough force that the crack of her ribs echoed. Collapsing in a heap, she recognized the still form of Frigga sprawled inelegantly next to her.

Then the pain overcame her.

\-------------------------------- 

She thought she asked for Jane in the infirmary, but all she really remembered was that lady doctor telling her to drink something that glowed.

She didn’t remember anything after that.

\-------------------------------

The next time she woke, it was to the dark and a numb body. She clumsily poked at herself to make sure she still had all of her parts and didn’t see Thor sitting at her bedside. When she finally noticed him, he smiled, but it was hollow.

Darcy blinked sluggishly, opening her mouth to try and speak, but not quite getting it right.

Pieces of recollections were coming back to her slowly, but it was hard to string two thoughts together. Her struggle must have read on her face because Thor leaned forward to grab a mug from a nearby table.

“The drought that sedated you was robust; they did not know how much you would require given your unique biology. I fear they were were too aggressive with their dosage,” he helped her sit up and held the mug to her mouth, “This should help clear your senses.”

It tasted like the horrible hangover cure with the raw egg in it that she had naively tried in college, but unlike that odious concoction, this brew sobered her right up.

The memory of the fight had Darcy clawing at her bedsheets to escape, but without the haze of whatever Asgardian morphine they’d had her on, her injuries made themselves known.

“Calm yourself, Darcy, you’re still wounded,” Thor tried to force her back down. Gently.

She searched for one of his hands to stop his pushing, “Thor, is Frigga… Is she…”

Thor let out a small sigh, looking over her shoulder at the far wall.

Darcy’s heart stopped.

“She’s not dead,” he finally said quietly, and Darcy’s heart restarted.

“That’s good, right?” she asked, cautious of his melancholy.

“Yes,” Thor smiled that sad facsimile again, “and I will be forever grateful to you, forever in your debt, that your actions and your bravery saved her from certain death. For she does live, but she was still grievously injured. She sleeps yet, but the healers are not certain that she will wake.”

Darcy went numb again. “I’m so sorry! I tried, I should have been faster or yelled louder, I should have saved your mom, Thor,” but he softly cut her off.

“You protected her when all else failed. You faced a villain who slew dozens of Asgardian soldiers, and you survived. You mustn’t blame yourself. it is only because of you that I still have a mother, that Asgard still has a queen. Believe me when I say that all of Asgard knows this and is thankful.”

A watery nod was the best she could offer in return, too overwhelmed with holding back flashes of getting a phone call in a bar and coming home to an empty house.

“It is this debt that I and all of my kingdom owe you, and because of the esteem I hold for you as my friend, that makes what I must ask of you so difficult. But please trust that it is necessary.”

“What are you talking about?” she fearfully asked.

He was talking about, Darcy discovered, the elves levelling the palace; about how defenseless the Asgardians were to their attack; about Odin locking away Jane and closing the Bifrost in a fit of rage; about the Aether and how it was killing her best friend.

She absorbed it all, feeling the numbness spread, unsure where her breaking point was but thinking it was fast approaching. Gathering her courage and staving it off for just a little longer, she asked “So you want to take Jane off world?”

Thor nodded, but squirmed.

Darcy knew why. “But you can’t take me.”

“Not in your condition. I don’t know what we will face. You aren’t able to protect yourself like this, and I cannot protect you and save Jane at the same time.”

She was so sick of crying. “Can you save Jane?”

Thor cradled the hand of her unhurt arm and met her gaze head on. “I swear to you, Darcy Lewis, as your friend and as your Shield Brother, I will save Jane.”

She looked at their entwined hands and ordered, "Then go do it.”

\---------------------------------------- 

Thor had warned her to lie: say that she had no idea what he had been planning. Her alibi was solid. The things they were medicating her with would have dropped a fully grown gorilla, so if anyone asked her anything, she was pleading ‘too fucking stoned’.

It had been almost a full day with no visitors but the healers, so she had thought she was in the clear. Odin appearing in her doorway quashed that dream and had her shaking in her metaphorical boots.

Or it did until the image of him flickered in and out, momentarily replaced by a pale, slender man with oily, raven hair.

Odin came back into focus and stepped forward. Darcy might have attributed it to the meds if it wasn’t for the man’s energy not matching Odin’s either. If she squinted right behind her glasses, then she could see through the sinister green tint that was Odin to the real man beneath.

The palace had been relentless in their treatment of her many maladies, and what would have been a ruined elbow on Earth was slowly being mended; what were two fractured ribs were already fused back together though still fragile. Even with her miraculous recovery, Darcy was still weak. As the unknown man stalked towards her bed disguised as a king, she worked to not let her vulnerabilities show.

“Sup, bro?”

In hindsight, she may have gone in too strong with the nonchalance. 

“I wanted to inform you that Thor has succeeded in stopping Malekith,” Faux-Odin smiled benevolently.

Forgetting that this was a precarious situation and desperate for news, Darcy eagerly asked, “And Jane?”

“Has survived, no worse for wear. I understand they had help from that SHIELD collective.”

For the first time in days, she could breathe easy. Jane was safe.

Darcy probably was not, but you can’t have it all.

“I thought you deserved to know,” he continued, “The simple mortal who saved the Queen of Asgard.”

Right then. Definitely an impostor. “Simple mortal, huh?”

“Yes?” he asked, confused.

“Yeah,” she was going to kick herself for this later or blame the drugs, but it couldn’t be good that someone was wearing an Odin suit, “You’re not the All-Father.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” he asked, but his shoulders straightened almost imperceptibly.

“I mean this whole glamor thing you’re doing. I don’t know why you went with Odin because that dude is way low on my list of people that I like, but I’m not even sure who you are beyond the fact that you need a good shampoo and some Vitamin D.”

He stood stunned only for a moment.

“I wanted to meet the Midgardian who stood down Malekith for Frigga. Thor neglected to mention…” he narrowed his eyes in a glower, but his features shifted almost immediately to glee, “Oh, you’re not what you appear, are you?”

“I could say the same about you.” Darcy refused to give an inch.

He giggled at that, and Odin faded from view, replaced by the man underneath. “This _is_ fun!”

With longer than a nanosecond to look at him, he was easily recognizable from the broadcast of the Battle of New York.

“Loki?" she questioned, dread building.

“So you do know me,” he said with a flourish, bowing so low that his nose reached his knees, “Now, I am desperate to know who you are.”

“Nobody, really,” she hedged, wincing at the pull in her side as she tried to inch up the bed.

Loki reached out, hovering over her bandaged elbow. He tapped the joint decidedly, making her flinch with pain, before wrapping a sinewy hand around it. 

“Now, now,” he trilled in a sing-song voice, “Don’t be shy!” He gave an experimental squeeze.

“Ok, hey, take it easy, Snivellus!” Darcy choked out.

He let go, appeased, and rocked back on his heels in maniacal anticipation. She blinked through the fog of her throbbing arm.

“You want to know who I am? Why don’t I show you.”

And she screamed in his stupid, smirking face.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For those who don't know this, Sif and Heimdall are siblings in the comics, so they're siblings in the movie for the purposes of this story.

Once again, Darcy had acted on impulse rather than a plan. The look on Loki’s face was worth it, even more than the actual escaping. The ground was almost comfortable, and despite Heimdall’s explanation that this was a dead realm to mirror the living one, she felt at home, safe.

A window opened right above her, showing a wide eyed Loki waving a hand over the bed where she had disappeared like maybe she was just invisible to his sight. His eyebrows rose all the way up to his slick hair when he encountered nothing but air.

The cold of MSS from where she laid under the heavy fog provided a welcome relief for her injuries, but it wasn’t enough to completely quell the burning pain coursing through her. After all those months of practicing with Jane and Betty, Darcy could keep herself in MSS for a decently long time with little strain, but sooner or later, she’d need another draught of that Asgardian painkiller.

Through the porthole, Loki was getting to his knees to check under the bed, hitting his head on the frame in his haste. Laughing at that hurt her tender ribs, and she had to take slow shallow breaths until it passed. Loki gave up searching the room for her with a frustrated scream that even she had to respect. In another life, Darcy thought this dude would have made an excellent Big Brother contestant.

With a roll of his shoulders, that eerie green light washed over him again and left the guise of an unfamiliar face dressed in the armor of the Asgardian guards. Loki adjusted his helmet and took long strides to the doorway, turning one last piercing gaze to the empty room before marching down the hall with purpose.

She blinked up at the fog, wanting nothing more than to close her eyes and rest here.

But Loki, who Thor had sworn up and down on their first day on the planet was imprisoned for eternity, was actually running around the palace in disguise. The same dude that sweet, loyal Thor had said could not be redeemed.

“That’s probably bad,” Darcy whimpered to herself, “Like monumentally bad.”

The same dude that had killed hundreds of people and destroyed billions of dollars worth of property in just hours on Earth.

“No,” she groaned.

The same dude that had tried to kill an entire planet because of his daddy issues.

“Shit,” she whispered, resigned.

Someone should probably stop him.

\--------------------------------------- 

The thing about being nearly beaten to death by Cosmic Kiebler elves? It really cramped your mobility.

Darcy supposed that she should be grateful the turd-blossom she’d fought hadn’t gone for her legs, but she didn’t have it in her to be optimistic as she slowly shuffled along. MSS didn’t have walls, was a never ending plane as far as she could tell, so navigating it had never occurred to her before.

But if it was a realm mirroring the living one like Heimdall said, then Darcy figured it had to be more than just one spot where she reappeared over and over. Without landmarks to guide her way, she’d had to rely on her other sense, that special sixth one that she was still trying to understand, to direct her. It had taken precious time that she wasn’t sure she had to channel her focus, but eventually, she felt a familiar soul out in the darkness.

She’d been ambling towards that energy, cursing her slow pace, and doing her best to keep her chest and arm steady as she limped. Darcy hoped she was really moving somewhere and not just walking in circles, but suddenly another window formed in the fog, showing her the owner of that spirit she’d been chasing.

Heimdall.

\------------------------------------------ 

His blindness had moved beyond inconvenience and well into a cause for distress. When Thor had warned them of their success branding them traitors to the crown, Heimdall had thought himself accepting of that inevitability.

He had been a fool.

For what did traitors to the crown receive?

A cell in the prison of Asgard which, despite the recent evidence to the contrary, were the most formidable in the nine realms. So impregnable were the walls that even his gifted sight could not pierce them.

It was most vexing.

To his left, his sister slept with her head on his shoulder as she had done while they were still children. Sif’s presence was heartening, but Volstagg and Fandral were not the most agreeable of cell mates. For one, Volstagg’s incessant complaints of his hunger were only serving to increase tensions. For another, Fandral had taken to describing the most decadent meals his quick mind could devise for “the entertainment of Volstagg’s reactions”. How Sif had fallen asleep amidst the barrage of annoyances was a mystery.

Any patience he may have won during his post as Guardian of Asgard was useless in the face of such horrors. If only he had his sight, he could at least divert his attention elsewhere, but alas, he was cruelly confined in all ways.

Heimdall was so entrenched in contemplating his miserable situation that he did not notice the sudden appearance of a warm body seated at his right.

A sharp poke to his arm startled him terribly, shaking Sif from her sleep on his left. Her reaction to the rude awakening was swift, but, fortunately, he caught her fist before it could make contact with his new friend.

“Woah, sorry,” Darcy Lewis attempted to hold her hands in supplication but aborted the movement with a grimace, cradling her bandaged arm to her chest, “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

Sif stared at Lady Darcy. Heimdall doubted anyone else in the room could see the slight frown line between her brows, but she was not alone in her confusion. Volstagg had done the impossible and stopped his whining. Fandral was smiling slyly, but that was his instinctive reaction to a female.

“Lady Darcy, you should not have come,” Heimdall warned her. He could not imagine what had possessed her.

“Yeah, I really should have,” she rested more fully against the wall and Heimdall noted her sallow pallor, “Loki just paid me a visit in my sick bed. Except he was pretending to be Odin through weird magic shit that I am trying not to think too hard about.”

Sif was quick to her feet.

“He has betrayed Thor,” she spat, “Like we all feared.”

The others joined Sif in standing, but Heimdall turned more fully to Lady Darcy.

“I don’t know about that,” she answered dully, “Since we are all still here and the worlds haven’t been consumed with darkness and all that. He said that Thor and Jane were fine, and I have to believe him for right now. I know they’re still alive at any rate; I’d know if they were dead. But he’s free in the palace, in a glamour to look like a regular guard.”

“We must find him!” Volstagg cried, swinging his fist with a strength that belied his previous lengthy oratories about his waning health. 

“Perhaps you haven’t noticed, my observant friend, that we are trapped within a cell,” Fandral haughtily reminded him.

Lady Darcy laughed, but it was weak.

“So not a problem, bro. Didn’t you hear? I have superpowers.”

\------------------------------------ 

Getting three big Asgardians out of the cell via MSS was easier said than done. Mostly because she needed to be touching all of them and there were only so many spots on her body that were both uninjured and not awkward.

Fandral hadn’t understood the not awkward objective until Sif stomped on his foot when his hand got a little too near her butt. Honestly, if she wasn’t fading quickly from pain and exhaustion, Darcy would have done it herself.

As it stood, she was close to collapsing by the time they were all out of the cell and in the hall. She was swaying so badly that she didn’t even get to see Sif knock the guards out which was a huge bummer. Heimdall caught her as her knees started to fail.

“Think I’ve used up all my adrenaline,” she slurred at him.

“You’ve done well, my friend. Stay and rest,” he hushed as he propped her carefully against the wall. Turning to the others, he ordered, “Volstagg, stay with Lady Darcy. It would be too dangerous for her to go with us, but someone must insure her safety.”

“It would be an honor,” Volstagg bowed. Fandral looked like he was about to protest, but a glare from Heimdall shut him up quick. Thank Frigga.

“But how will you know who Loki is?” she asked, not wanting them to be caught unawares.

Heimdall bared his teeth. “He will not hide from my eyes. Not again.”

\--------------------------------- 

 

Darcy hadn’t expected for Odin (the real one) to be the one to come fetch them an hour later. Volstagg had been regaling her with tales of Thor and the predicaments his arrogant rage had gotten them into, which was great because she had so much blackmail material on the Thunder God now, when the king came striding down the stairs. 

Odin paused and actually smiled when Volstagg raised his axe, not the usual response of a regent being threatened by a subject. He looked approving as he said, “You are right to be cautious, but I assure you that I am the All-Father.”

Volstagg didn’t put down his weapon until Darcy confirmed Odin’s identity with a nod.

“My King, I am glad to see you are well,” he said with a deep bow.

“Yes, I am quite well, thanks to the efforts of your comrades and the Princess Darcy. Loki,” he paused to clear his throat and Darcy noticed the white knuckle grip he had on his staff, “Loki had me at a disadvantage. I do not presume to know what goes on in his mind, no one possesses enough divination for that, but he certainly meant to do me harm.”

Odin continued his descent into the prison hall and moved to stand before them. 

“Given that your actions have helped save not only the nine realms but also possibly my life, I believe that your punishments should be revisited. At the very least, you should not be kept here any longer. Go home to your family, Volstagg.”

The Asgardian needed no further words and bent to scoop Darcy up, but Odin stopped him. “Leave the Princess. I shall attend to her.”

To Volstagg’s credit, he hesitated, clearly unsure about leaving her with the All-Father. Darcy, not wanting any trouble for her new buddy, patted him on the knee, the only body part eye level with how she was slumped. “No worries, Volsty. Not like a cell will hold me if I don’t wanna be held.”

She’d meant it as a joke, but a look at Odin’s stoic face made her gulp internally. Best to not tease the grumpy bastard.

Assured, Volstagg left, sending a sunny wave to her before ducking out of view.

Odin just stared at her. With one eye. Double the intimidation rather than half of it, defying all logic.

“Listen, yes, I definitely committed a jail break,” Darcy broke easily but the drugs had worn off a while back, and she was in incredible pain so sue her, “Jail break is definitely a crime on my world, I’ll give you that, but it was in self defense! I was in reasonable fear for my life and safety! No jury would convict me!”

Odin finally blinked.

“Democracy seems like an inefficient system. So much…” he inhaled deeply as he searched for the word, “Squabbling. Asgard does not have trials by peers. The only judgment valid here is the monarch’s.”

The sweat gathering on her neck was not from the pain.

The All-Father continued, unaware of or without regard for her anxiety. “My judgment is this: Although you are powerful in ways I have not seen in my several thousand years, in your time on Asgard you have used your considerable abilities to save both its Queen and its King. In point of fact, you nearly lost your own life in defense of my wife and have caused yourself great discomfort to ensure that a villain was defeated.”

The shuddering sigh of relief hurt more than helped, but Darcy couldn’t help it.

“That villain, Loki? Is he…” she trailed off.

“Escaped, I am afraid.”

“Um,” she cringed, “shouldn’t we be fucking worried about that? Last time he was on the loose, a hell of a lot fuckery went down.”

Odin guffawed, laughing so hard that his eye leaked. An inappropriate reaction to a valid concern, Darcy thought.

“I cannot recall the last time someone was so crude in my presence. I am certain that a princess never has been,” he wiped a tear from his eye, “You are unique, aren’t you?”

Shocking her more than anything had in the last few days, including apocalyptic events and space travel, he bent down to pick her up, smoothly depositing her on her feet while keeping an arm around her waist. Odin took most of her weight, allowing for her to take the stairs with little trouble.

“Loki will be caught. Now that the threat of the Dark Elves is behind us, all of the kingdom’s resources will be used in the search. Rest your fears,” Odin said, pretty jovial for a dude talking about sending an army after his son.

He was a weird guy.

\---------------------------------------- 

“Hello, old friend,” he called out, making his way on the rocky terrain, “How good it is to see you once again in better circumstances. You’ll have to forgive me for my actions at our last encounter, I was not myself.”

Loki treaded the path, mindful of keeping all parts of himself contained within the safety of the passage way. It would not do to lose a finger to the inky expanse surrounding him.

“Truly, I was a fool to squander your generosity before. My head too full of insolent old men and their lies, of revenge and glory,” he lilted, his voice echoing in the small pocket of air he was traversing. The gossamer walls enhanced the majesty of the stars surrounding him.

“In spite of your antics, you would not be fool enough to show your face here,” the rumbling came from a stone throne floating above, overlooking comets and asteroids, “Not unless you were sure I would not kill you for your failure with the Tesseract.”

The throne slowly spun to show its speaker, his purple skin glinting in the starlight.

“Now, Loki Laufeyson, fallen son of Asgard, what could you possibly have for me that would protect you? I can think of nothing so valuable,” Thanos jeered.

Loki smiled. “Not something. Someone.”

\------------------------------ 

After escorting Princess Darcy back to the infirmary and paying a visit to his slumbering queen, Odin made his way to check on the reconstruction of the throne room. It was coming along nicely; luckily, the damage had been mostly superficial rather than structural. As he was inspecting the gilding on his new throne, he felt a presence emanating from the vast shadows cast by the numerous columns.

Not many could get so close to the All-Father without his notice. Fewer still could use the absence of light as a portal.

One only, as a point of fact.

“Mephisto,” Odin said and subtly angled his staff, threat readily apparent, “This is a bold move, even for you. Entering Asgard uninvited?”

“Now, now, Odin,” the Demon King stepped into the sunlight, showing his fanged teeth in that smile that had beguiled so many innocent souls, “Can’t we play nicely for once?”

That stench of dark magic, the same one he had stained his daughter with, wafted through to throne room and burned Odin’s nostrils, so much more pungent directly from the source.

“There are rules for us rulers that even you abide; the most important of which being not trespassing into another’s world,” Odin spat.

“I am wounded at the accusation,” Mephisto huffed, opening his eyes wide and holding a hand over his chest, “I would never be so undiplomatic. My realm is not the one known for… those breaks in decorum. Was it not your son that lead an unprovoked attack on Laufey’s world? And people call me a monster…”

Odin hated Mephisto.

It was the unpleasant reality of a monarch that you must deal with other monarchs, no matter how deplorable. Even he and Laufey had met for numerous negotiations before that terrible war.

But it was his dealings with Mephisto that held the honor of being the most distasteful. In order to be King of the largest hell dimension, one had to be ruthless, vicious, horrific, and all related things to the upmost degree.

Mephisto fit that bill perfectly.

“That matter was handled, as you well know. You may leave this realm of your own volition, or I shall force you from it myself. Make your choice.”

He made a ‘tsk’ noise at Odin. Odin had never been tsk’ed. 

“The mighty All-Father, always letting his emotions get the better of him. That is not the way to rule a kingdom, you know. I have a great therapist who could help you, wonderful guy,” Mephisto walked forward to meet him, every step smoldering as it touched the floor and leaving embers burning behind the demon. “But that’s for another time. I have every right to be here, most especially if we’re to be civilized and hold to that which separates us from the animals: your precious diplomacy.” 

He halted just before the staff’s tip touched his chest, presenting a sickening mirror to when his daughter had done just the same days earlier. Odin sneered at the comparison. It had become quite evident that father and daughter held little in common.

“There is no diplomacy in your presence. No pretty words of yours will convince me.”

“Ah,” Mephisto purred and leaned in, letting the staff dig into his flesh, “I have no need for pretty words. The truth is on my side. For you hold a member of my house, have held her for some time.”

The Demon King in all of his flaming, abominable horror would leave many a soul cowering in fear. The All-Father, however, would need more than cheap posturing.

“Why yes,” Odin coolly replied, not moving his staff from its position, “The Princess Darcy has been here many days. I cannot see how that is any concern of yours.”

“Really? You don’t see how stealing my daughter from her home would concern me?” Mephisto scoffed, literal steam coming off him in his rage.

“Now you are the one throwing accusations. Asgard does not make a habit of kidnapping people from their realms.”

Mephisto had the audacity to swat the staff from his chest, nearly wrenching it from Odin’s grip.

“Nor does Asgard make a habit of welcoming Midgardians,” he growled, taking advantage of Odin’s shocked paralysis, “Asgard hasn’t shown any interest in Midgard for an age. Explain yourself.”

Odin’s surprise laid less in Mephisto’s violent outburst and more at the truth it unveiled. “You care for her.”

“She is my child, you half wit,” Mephisto rolled his eyes, “Of course, I care for her. Not all of us have the parenting instincts of an eel.”

Insults, lovely. This was a day of firsts for Odin.

“Darcy is a guest of my son’s. She is a friend and ally of Asgard. As such, she has my protection.”

That was enough to stop Mephisto from smoking up the throne room, at least. “Why would you offer such a thing to an heir of mine?” he asked, puzzled.

“Because she saved both my life and the life of my wife.”

After a beat, Mephisto wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Ugh,” he gagged, “Why in Hell would she do that?”


	13. Chapter 13

They were going to die.

Well, Thor would probably live.

But Darcy was totally dead.

“Heimdall said that this was the place she was being held?” Thor whispered in the dark, his murmur still sounding thunderous in the deserted street. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining on them, a small mercy in London, but it was still cold as balls. Nodding in the affirmative, Darcy was this close to freezing her tits off . Even Thor looked chilled in his wool coat.

“Are we sure we shouldn’t be calling your super friends for back up? Heimdall said these dudes were seriously packing. Anyone that can modify Chitauri tech means business, right?” Darcy asked not for the first time, eyes nervously darting to the warehouse with its ominously barred windows.

Heimdall’s exact words had been “impressively formidable”. She understood Thor was on supremely thin ice with Daddy Dearest, but it was way not cool for Odin to forbid Asgardian aid to them. Jane had been kidnapped from their apartment by a small army dressed in black riot gear. Kind of a big deal, but the All-Father’s reasoning, that they needed to keep out of Midgardian affairs, was weak.

She and Thor had been out on their bi-monthly pub crawl, a tradition born shortly after Darcy’s return to Earth which had evolved into an excuse to see who could outdrink the other. Jane usually played referee, when not actively participating and losing, but she had been close to cracking Einstein-Rosen Bridge travel (without the help of the Bifrost) and thus had stayed home to work. Ian, still in the dog house to Darcy because of his treachery but becoming more and more useful to Jane for his knowledge, had been assisting her research.

Thor and she’d been at their fourth bar when Ian had come rushing in, eyes purpled and lip split, yelling for them to come quick, that Jane had been kidnapped.

SHIELD hadn’t been able to find a single lead, a fuck up so monumental for a supposedly omniscient spy agency that Darcy wondered how they ever got anything done. As a last resort, they’d gone to Asgard, a risky maneuver. Thor, when he had come to collect Darcy after she had healed enough from the Convergence incident, had not parted with Odin on the best of terms. He’d never told Darcy exactly what had been said, though she hoped he’d confided in Jane for his emotional well-being, but Darcy had heard the prince and the king’s shrieking from a whole wing away. Odin had been polite and even warm in his goodbye to her, going so far as to declare that she could always find safe haven in Asgard, but the Thunder God had been waved off with steely silence.

Thor showing up in Asgard for the first time in months only to ask for a favor had not gone over well. While the prince went to face off with his papa, Darcy, showing great foresight, had cut out the middleman and asked Heimdall to use his sight before Odin could do something dumb like refuse Thor help.

Good thing she had because that’s exactly what Odin had done. As he showed them the metaphorical door, Heimdall threw her a wink before activating the Bifrost, his conscience clear from having already told Darcy where Jane was being held and information on who was holding her.

So here she and Thor were, about to perform a two person rescue mission in a scary building full of dangerous enemy combatants. All Darcy was saying was that having Captian America at their back couldn’t hurt.

“Do you really think we have the time to wait for my comrades to get here?” Thor asked, not unkindly.

Darcy thought about tiny Jane inside, most likely yelling at her captors and taking swings at guys twice her size with guns.

“No,” she sighed, “I really don’t.”

She grabbed his hand and hummed.

\------------------------------ 

The plan had been simple. While she couldn’t find Jane’s aura over a long distance in MSS, she’d tried when Jane had first gone missing, Darcy knew she’d feel her over a short range.

She and Thor were going to get inside via MSS, scope the scene for the best place to drop Thor so he could do what he did best, and then Darcy would get Jane out in the ensuing chaos. 

Meet back at the apartment for celebratory cupcakes.

There were a lot of cupcakes in their kitchen. Darcy was a stress baker.

The plan was going swimmingly right up to Darcy depositing the big guy in a large control room full of a couple dozen soldiers milling about with a few white coated science types intermixed.

Thor started zapping and smashing on cue, but as Darcy rematerialized in MSS, something was different about the air. She figured out what that something was real quick.

Mostly because of the hand that wrapped around hers.

Screaming did nothing in the realm of the dead.

\------------------------------ 

With the first crack of thunder and flash of white light under her door, Jane was standing at the ready.

It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that she hadn’t been scared while she’d been imprisoned, but she had learned long ago that anger was a good way to burn through unwanted emotions. 

It hadn’t been hard to let rage consume her when weasel faced guys manhandled her into an interrogation room after beating up her would-be research assistant and dragging her out of her home. 

It was really easy to be furious when the man sent to question her thought she was nothing more than a girl who had spread her legs to an alien in return for technological advancements to pass off as her own.

Jane didn’t remember what she had yelled at the guy, but she still had blood on her wrists from trying to lunge over the table and claw his face off.

Shackles were surprisingly sharp.

She’d been locked in this room with a depressingly bare cot and a rusty toilet with no seat or lid after that. Honestly, Jane was shocked it had taken Darcy and Thor this long to mount a rescue, but the important thing was that they came through in the end. She’d never doubted that they would find her. The how of it all was unexpected, though.

Darcy, in torn clothes, hair wild and eyes wide, skin white as bone and breathing heavily, suddenly appeared in her cell.

“Uh,” Jane drawled, “Are you okay?”

“No. Definitely not, but it’ll be fine. Probably,” Darcy said, pulling up the arm of her black sweatshirt from where it was hanging by a lone, scraggly strip.

“Not to sound ungrateful,” Jane began while eying her haggard appearance, “But I thought we agreed to leave the fighting to Thor after your run in with the Dark Elves?” She couldn’t help her disapproving tone; Darcy didn’t need any more close calls.

“Believe me,” he friend chuckled, but it was shriller than her normal belly laughs, “The plan only had Thor doing all the violent things. The universe doesn’t like my plans, apparently. You ready to go?”

Jane rolled her eyes.

“Obviously, Darce.”

“Cool,” Darcy took Jane’s hand, her own shaking badly, “When we get to MSS, don’t let go of me. Hold on as tight as you can. We’re going to have to run.”

“What?” Jane had spent a lot of time in MSS. She couldn’t think of a single reason they’d need to run. They’d always been safe there, alone.

Hadn’t they?

The sound of blasts rang through the door.

“No time to explain,” Darcy said, drawing in a gulp of air, “We stick together, and we run like hell.”

Jane nodded and winced at her scream.

\------------------------------

Outside the cell, Thor’s joyous howls echoed throughout the warehouse, accompanied by the thumps of bodies and the crashing of Mjolnir through concrete walls. Calling on enough lightning to level the place, he let it loose just as he rolled through a hole to the street.

Neither he nor the two women who’d escaped seconds before him ever noticed the emblem with the skull and its eight legs painted on the wall of the control room, nor did they see the camera mounted next to it, red light glowing steadily through the smoke.

\------------------------------

Darcy heard the front door being thrown open, followed by raucous laughter. Knowing it was Thor, she focused on the task at hand: holding Jane’s hair back from her face as she vomited. The cool tile was pushing at a bruise she’d gotten on her knee, but she ignored it as she rubbed Jane’s shuddering back.

“Jane? Darcy?” Thor called out from the living room, still lost to the euphoria of victory, “There are cakes to be had!”

At the mention of the sugary food, Jane’s heaving increased tenfold.

“In here!” Darcy yelled through the open door. Thor filled the frame, quickly coming to crouch with them by the toilet. Letting Thor’s hands replace hers, Darcy slipped back to lean against the tub, trusting that he could take the lead in Jane’s care.

“What happened? What did they do to you?” Thor asked, heedless of Jane’s inability to talk. There was nothing left to throw up, but she hadn’t caught her breath.

Darcy clenched her fists in her lap, fingers creaking from the strain. She stared at a chip in the floor as she answered for her friend.

“They didn’t do anything. Not to her, at least.”

Thor finally tore his eyes from Jane, seemingly noticing her rough state for the first time.

“Did they,” he asked, confusion coloring his tone, “Did our enemies do something to you?” He nodded to the bloody rip in her jeans.

“No.”

She kept her eyes on that chipped tile.

Thor looked between her and Jane, at a loss.

“They were monsters,” Jane croaked from where she was huddled over the toilet bowl, “They were the worst kind of monsters.”

Darcy closed her eyes at the reminder, but immediately opened them again. She didn’t want to relive the past hour, not ever again. 

Never wanted to remember cold hands grabbing at anything they could, of mouths hanging open in pained cries, or the mass of bodies swarming in their fear and confusion, all of them broken, so mutilated and mangled they barely looked human anymore...

She shoved Jane out of the way as her control over her own stomach was lost. Two sets of hands steadied her.

“There were dozens of... people in MSS,” Jane furiously rasped through her sore throat, “Whoever it was that took me, they killed all of those people.”

Thor gathered the stray hair that had fallen out of Darcy’s ponytail and tucked it behind her ear.

“That is obviously a tragedy, but I still do not understand why…” he trailed off.

Darcy wiped her mouth, grimacing at the acidic taste of bile.

“It’s not that they died, Thor, but _how_. They were totally ravaged...” she thought back to her history class at Culver about the second world war and felt nauseous all over again, “They looked like the old pictures of Mengele’s victims.”

Thor looked at them blankly.

“Human experimentation,” Jane filled in for him “They were experimenting on...I don’t know who they were or why they wanted me, but they were torturing people.”

\------------------------------

No one slept that night. The three of them sat unmoving on the couch, watching shadows play on the walls from the moonlight pouring through the tall windows. Completely silent until sunlight crept up through the glass, the warmth hitting first their toes and then spreading.

An unspoken vigil.

Once the birds were chirping outside and people could be heard beginning their commute on the street below, Thor rose.

“I believe the time to call on the Avengers has come.”

\------------------------------

It was remarkable in its irony. The mad scientist chasing fairy tales, using increasingly far fetched measures to induce greatness in the ordinary, and a miracle happens once Pierce takes over the London base after forcing Strucker to Sokovia.

He had to chuckle at that.

Pierce watched the video again, seeing the mysterious young woman materialize out of thin air with Thor and then disappear once again without the Asgardian, seemingly at her own discretion and without any help.

“Do we know who she is yet?” he asked.

“Sir?” Rumlow raised a brow at him.

“The girl, the one who apparently teleports, do we have any clue who she is?” Pierce asked, annoyed at having to repeat himself.

“We know who she is, sir,” Rumlow spoke, carefully enunciating every word, “Darcy Lewis. She’s Jane Foster’s assistant, the one who kept spotting all of her tails. Barton was sent to asses her. Remember?”

As a point of fact, Pierce did not.

He really should remember that, but none of it sounds even remotely familiar. Given his two lives, he prided himself on being detail oriented to a compulsive degree.

Yet he had absolutely no memory of Darcy Lewis.

Rumlow was still standing at attention, traces of skepticism bleeding onto his face.

“Yes,” Pierce coughed, “Clearly we need a better picture of her on file.”

Nodding, Rumlow looked appeased.

“This needs to be looked into, but it will have to wait,” Pierce began. His lapse in memory would also need to be looked into, but privately. Such a vulnerability could be a tactical advantage to too many. “Right now, we have more pressing concerns.”

“The Lemurian Star,” Rumlow agreed, “Romanoff never made it to the rendezvous point. Heard her and Cap arguing about different missions. She slipped a thumb drive into her belt on the quinjet.”

“Damn,” he sighed. Fury was better than he had given him credit for, even if it was too little, too late, “We’re too close to let anything screw it up. Fury needs to be taken care of.”

Pierce sat down at his desk, pulling out the notes he would need for his meeting with the World Security Council later today.

“Wake the Soldier.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made another playlist for this story that can be found on [here](http://8tracks.com/cuddliestcactus/in-the-end-she-appears-redux) !

Fury knew too much.

Pierce watched his friend disappear from his office, weariness settling in his chest. He’d hoped to have more time, confident that given enough of it, he’d be able to convince the director of the necessity of HYDRA.

HYDRA was the only logic in the chaos. Fury would have been compliant, would have been rewarded for his compliance, if _Pierce had had more time_.

That was impossible now. He returned to the Council to end the meeting, cutting short their protestations. Settling back into his desk, he called Rumlow.

“Send in the Soldier.”

\---------------------------------- 

When Iron Man first broke on the scene, Darcy read about the unknown armored suit that single handedly liberated the village of Gulmira on the BBC app while walking to a history lecture. A few short weeks after that, she watched Tony Stark smugly announce “I Am Iron Man” while munching on Cheerios in her dorm room. She remembered admiring the ballsy move, small wisps of respect growing in her mind. During that whole Stark Expo fiasco, Darcy had been mostly preoccupied with spit balling SHIELD goons, but she still followed the news coverage of the aftermath with an interest born of her admiration for the Red and Gold.

Darcy was having a hard time reconciling that the same man staring at the coffee in her outstretched hand, his face in the closest approximation of a 404 Error Page that she had ever seen, was also the genius superhero she liked so much.

Tony, as he’d told her to call him earlier while rambling something about people who had electrocuted Thor having to stick together, made a choking noise behind gritted teeth.

“Are you allergic to coffee or something? Or are you having an aneurysm?” she asked, retracting the proffered cup slowly.

“No,” he said, still eyeing the coffee warily, “I have a thing. Being handed things, I mean, huge no-go for me.”

Darcy turned to glance at Thor who just shrugged his gorilla shoulders and took a sip from his own caramel latte, extra whip. She’d gone to the place down the street with the best grounds, figuring they should start the day with something good before having to face what remained of that horrible base. Everyone else had been appropriately thankful for the gesture. Clint was somehow drinking his while hanging upside down, his head off the edge of the couch and legs thrown over the back, eyes closed and humming in contentment. Jane was carefully sipping her tea, knowing that too much caffeine would shoot her nerves today. 

That just left Tony and his apparent issues.

Darcy could only deal with so many things, so she extended her arm until the coffee cup brushed his chest and then let it slip through her fingers.

Tony squawked as he moved to catch it before it spilled and burned his junk.

“There,” Darcy smiled sweetly, “I didn’t hand it to you.”

Tony stared, looking from the leaking cup in his grasp and back to her.

“Well played,” he admitted, taking a dainty sip.

\---------------------------------- 

B-U-C-K-Y.

It was all he could think about. Five letters.

They’d been carved into the ice of his cryotube when he woke up, flashes of dreams that he couldn’t quite reach plaguing him. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d dreamt.

He couldn’t remember much of anything.

They’d prepped him, told him of his target, gave him his gun, gave him the location where they would force his quarry. Left him to prepare.

But all he could do was repeat those letters to himself, over and over in his cold mind.

Even as he shot under the car, as he ripped open the door, as he trailed his target to an apartment building, used the line of sight of the blonde man to fire armor piercing rounds into his mission, as he ran across roofs to avoid detection, he thought them over and over.

B-U-C-K-Y.

He heard the blonde man pursuing him, crashing through windows, making great leaps that the Asset had only ever seen himself land, landing on the roof behind him.

The whistle of a projectile of some kind hurtling through the air.

Even as he grabbed it with his arm, threw it back with all of his strength, he did all of it on instinct rather than any thought because he was too consumed with one thing:

B-U-C-K-Y

\---------------------------------- 

Jane, Thor, and Darcy had agreed to keep Darcy’s abilities under wraps. Thor vouched for his team mates, sure, but Darcy still didn’t know most of them from Adam (the one exception being Clint, but a drinking buddy did not necessarily an ally make). When Thor had called Tony, he’d requested the aid of the Avengers to get to the bottom of who had been responsible for kidnapping Jane and what they were doing torturing people. Steve and Natasha were already on some covert mission and couldn’t be reached, but Clint had been working out of New York for months. He and Tony were on a jet to London within the hour. 

The apartment had been cramped the night before.

“So,” Clint drawled, shoving crushed bits of cement out of the way so they could walk around the control room, “How did you guys find out they were doing human experimentation here? Because SHIELD has been going over the wreckage for a full twenty four hours, and we haven’t found any evidence of that yet.”

Darcy heard Jane gulp. Stepping on her foot behind a charred filing cabinet, Darcy stopped Jane from trying to lie. Poker was still her game.

“Considering SHIELD couldn’t get their shit together when rescuing Jane, that doesn’t really surprise me,” Darcy shot back easily, an eyebrow crooked accusingly.

SHIELD had swarmed the warehouse soon after she and Thor had hit it, but they hadn’t talked to the agency directly, not even to Ian who had shown up to check on Jane. Thor was just as wary of SHIELD as Darcy, the weight of their failure too much to dismiss.

Clint huffed a laugh. “You don’t pull your punches, do you?”

“Never saw the point.”

“God, you’re like a smaller, darker Pepper,” Tony chimed in from where he was hunched over a computer that had miraculously survived Thor’s rampage, “If this was ten years ago, I’d have been all over you.”

“If this was ten years ago, I’d have been fifteen, you perv,” Darcy grimaced.

To his credit, so did Tony. “Okay, no, I would not have been all over that. I just meant that though I am currently in a monogamous, committed relationship with the light of my life, if I was single, I’d…” he trailed off.

Darcy came over to stand behind him, peering over his shoulder at the screen. “It’s good that you know when to stop digging yourself further into a hole.”

“Huh?” Tony jerked, startled at her voice right next to his ear, “Oh, I don’t know how to do that, I just found something weird. Actually, I did not find something, and that was weird.”

Darcy wasn’t listening, instead reading the code. She pushed his hands out of the way to back up a few lines. Tony let her, blinking bewilderedly.

“Someone erased all the data remotely,” she concluded.

“You code?” Tony asked.

“I hacked the DMV for Thor once. Also some SHIELD satellites for Jane during the Battle of New York.” It was probably dumb to be bragging to one of the smartest people on the planet, but she didn’t love his tone of suspicion.

“You kind of look like me,” Tony squinted, holding up a thumb to block the top half of her face from his vision, “Similar noses and chins. Please tell me you know who your father is.”

“Dude,” Darcy laughed, “You have no idea.”

“That was not an answer,” Tony muttered worriedly, but she was too busy typing.

“Thor!” she yelled, troubled by what she was discovering. He came at her call, but only frowned at the computer, not knowing what to make of the data. “There’s an active camera feed on here,” she quickly explained, “It isn’t broadcasting now, but that’s because it’s been shut off. The default is to send a video feed… somewhere.”

“I’ll find where,” Tony pushed her out of the way and got to work.

She leaned on Thor. Now that she knew what to search for, she easily found the camera nestled high in the corner of the control room. It was covered in soot, like the rest of the wall, but was intact.

Nudging Thor, she pointed out the camera. “They have video of everything that happened in here,” she said quietly so they wouldn’t be overheard.

“We cannot be sure of that,” Thor wrapped an arm across her back and pulled her close, “It is no use fretting over something that is uncertain. You, Jane, I, and now also my shield brethren will, as you like to say, deal with it.”

Even as she smiled, she couldn’t help a small tremble, couldn’t look away from that innocuous camera. Maybe it was because it was in the corner of her vision, because she wasn’t focusing on it and could see it abstractly, but as she stared at the camera, a strange pattern emerged on the wall next to it, like something was painted underneath the ash.

“Clint,” she moved from Thor’s supportive embrace to stand closer, “Can you still do your circus acrobat shit?”

“Hey,” came Clint’s indignant shout from across the room, “I told you that in confidence! You pinky promised!”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Oh my Frigga, Jane could care less, and Thor likes all forms of entertainment. And do you really think Tony Stark doesn’t already know about all of that?”

“I definitely know about all of that,” Tony said, never looking up from the computer.

Clint huffed all the way over to her. “Still not cool. But yes, I am as spry as ever.”

“Do you think you could get up there to wipe away the soot? I think there’s something on the wall underneath.”

“Yeah,” he craned his neck, “I think you’re right. Gimme a sex. Sec! A sec!”

Darcy laughed hard at that.

That is until Clint had cleaned enough of the wall to reveal an emblem as familiar and horrifying as the swastika.

“Is that…” Jane began.

“HYDRA,” answered Tony, voice hard.

\---------------------------------- 

The man on the bridge had been… wrong.

The buzz of scientists echoed around him in the vault, but he paid them no mind. They were fixing his arm from where the little spider had thrown her bite.

Little spider? No, she was a woman, but she was…

He shook his head, scaring the man to his left.

But the man on the bridge.

He’d said the letters.

B-U-C-K-Y.

But the man was too big. He needed to be smaller.

That didn’t make sense.

“Mission report.”

He did not move at the command, unseeing.

A blow to his face helped harness his thoughts, to concentrate on his handler. Pain was good for that.

“Mission report,” the handler repeated.

He opened his mouth to answer, but an open file folder on the far desk distracted him. Rather, the picture pinned to the folder distracted him.

It was the girl. The one who had shown him the letters.

B-U-C-K-Y.

Another hard blow to the face.

“I will not ask again, Soldier. Mission report.”

He looked at his handler, wanting to ask about the man on the bridge, but something stopped him, a voice inside whispering _‘Don’t’_.

The girl, with the big blue eyes, the girl that gave him the letters… It was her voice.

He would listen to her. He wouldn’t ask about the man on the bridge, the man that was too big.

“One of the targets was eliminated. The other, the woman, I shot her, but she was protected by an unknown assailant. Strong.”

His handler nodded.

“See? That wasn’t so hard,” his handler straddled a stool in front of him, “Now we don’t even have to take the time for a wipe.”

His handler smiled, but he shuddered. He couldn’t be wiped now.

He couldn’t lose the letters.

B-U-C-K-Y.

Unaware of his panic, his handler kept on.

“You’ve shaped the century. I need you to do it one last time, so HYDRA can give the world the freedom it deserves.”

He nodded.

\---------------------------------- 

“I can’t get a hold of Cap,” Tony sighed from the couch.

Clint threw his phone across the cabin of the plane, landing it perfectly on the pillow next to Tony. “I can’t get Natasha, either.”

“Uh, guys?” Jane was perched in front of the television, CNN on mute. She grabbed the remote to turn on the volume, but the headline was clear. 

_Captain America Arrested After Firefight on Freeway_

“This is bad, right? Like crazy bad?” Darcy asked, frozen next to Jane.

“Nat said Fury was working something big,” Clint answered, “But this is… This is really bad, yeah.”

“Is that not the Lady Natasha, leaning against the car?” Thor chimed in.

“Holy shit,” Clint put his head in his hands.

“I’m finally into SHIELD, so we can get some goddamn answers,” Tony grunted, furiously typing on his tablet.

“There is no way those answers are good, bro,” Darcy mumbled, but Jane jabbed her in the ribs with her bony elbows. 

“Fuck,” Tony rubbed a hand over his face, “Yeah, answers are bad. Fury’s dead.”

“What?” Clint monotoned.

“He’s dead. Killed yesterday.”

“Shit.”

\---------------------------------- 

The man, the one from the bridge and the one who was too small, he kept saying the letters.

He wanted to ask the man why, but he was fighting him. He had to fight him.

He had to fight him because…

 

Another hard blow to the face with that metal shield, the one with the familiar colors. The man was vaulting back up to the walkway, and he should have shot the man, especially as he plugged in a chip to the mainframe of the helicarrier and told someone to fire, but he couldn’t do anything. Wouldn’t do anything else to him.

Why did he know those colors?

\---------------------------------- 

In Pierce’s last moments, he meant to use his final breath for HYDRA.

Instead, a red face hovered over him where he lay bleeding out onto the floor.

“Hello again,” said the devil, words smelling like sulfur, “You’re coming with me.”

\---------------------------------- 

There were flames everywhere, the ship was falling, and he was stuck under a metal beam. 

The man was gone, and he couldn’t see those familiar colors, and everything hurt.

Crying was not helping, but the tears burned his eyes anyway.

Then the man was there. For the first time, he was happy that the man was big. If he’d been small, then the man never could have lifted the beam.

He slithered out from under, wiping his eyes clear of the stinging water. The man knelt next to him, but was leaning back, away from him.

“You know me,” said the man, tensing up and resting his weight on his haunches like he was preparing to take a hit.

He was tired of hitting.

“No,” he said, “You’re too big. You’re supposed to be smaller.”

The man sobbed a laugh at that.

“You said that before,” the man cried, “God, Bucky…”

“Those letters… B-U-C-K-Y. I know them. She gave them to me. What… What are they?”

“They’re your name, Buck,” the man leaned forward, ignoring the chaos around them.

“My name,” he… Bucky sighed, “My name.”

There was a soft touch on his arm, the flesh one. The man was leaning across a cracked window, colorful shield laying uselessly next to him.

“Who is she, Buck? Who gave you your name?”

Bucky was going to answer, wanted to trust the man, but the crack in the window splintered at that moment, sending the man careening through and slamming his head on a steel beam. He watched the man’s eyes flutter shut as he fell through the air to the water below.

“Steve!” Bucky yelled and jumped after him.

The man’s name was Steve.

\----------------------------------

It was total pandemonium after they landed, what with a chunk of DC destroyed by helicarrier debris and the total implosion of one of the world’s premier intelligence agencies. The political scientist in Darcy was drawn to the story in the wreckage, but the larger part of her, the survivor in her, did not want to be anywhere near it.

“Finally got a hold of Nat,” Clint said as they exited the airport, “Cap’s in the hospital. Said we’d meet her there.”

“I’ll call a car,” Tony stepped away, pulling out his cell phone.

“Jane and I’ll go get set up at a hotel,” Darcy offered to Thor, “You can go check on your friend.”

“Unless you want us to go with you?” Jane asked, but Darcy was secretly relieved when he turned them down. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t go and support Thor if he needed it, but she and Jane weren’t a part of this world, the world of shady agents and fucking HYDRA.

It was better that they weren’t involved directly.

\----------------------------------

None of the scientists were the same size as him. It was a problem because he needed civilian clothes, and though there was now an abundance of clothing available to him, what with the bodies strewn about the vault, none of them would fit. He’d come back for answers, but they’d wanted him to go back: back into the chair, back into the tube, back into the shell of the Asset that had no name.

He was tired of hitting, but he was more tired of not having his name.

Bucky hadn’t killed any of them. He hadn’t needed to go that far, but they wouldn’t be getting up. Not for a long time.

A tremor of uncertainty ran up his back, but he beat it back. He had saved Steve, but he couldn’t stay with Steve. Not yet. 

All he had was his name, and he needed more than that.

The file on the desk caught his attention once again, the one with her picture pinned to the inside. Picking it up, he fingered the crisp lettering at the bottom of the photograph.

Darcy Lewis.

\----------------------------------

“This is way too much,” Jane whined for the umpteenth time the next day.

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Darcy held up a dress to the light. “We literally hopped on Tony Stark’s jet straight from that creepy HYDRA base. We have no toiletries, no clothes, not even our phone chargers. You may be totally okay with wearing the clothes you slept in the night before, but some of us have higher standards.”

Jane straightened from where she had been slouched and pouting in one the overstuffed chairs in the boutique’s dressing room. “Okay, that was borderline bitchy. Are you okay?”

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” Darcy put the dress down and sighed, “I’m just on edge.”

“About not having clothes?”

“No, Janey,” she had to laugh at her friend’s obtuseness, “Although, we did score some excellent threads at the last store. Can you really not think of anything that we should be worried about?”

Jane’s brow furrowed as she contemplated, and Darcy went to sit next to her.

“HYDRA, boss lady. I’m freaking out about HYDRA.”

“Oh,” she pulled Darcy further into the plush chair, squeezing them both onto the loveseat, “Darce, it’ll be fine. The Avengers are on it.”

“They have a video of me doing my wacky party trick. That is a huge cause for concern.”

“We don’t know for sure that they have that, and Captain America just dealt them a pretty huge blow. They probably have more to worry about than one girl, you know, like not getting pulverized by Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.”

“I guess,” Darcy conceded, plucking at pulls in Jane’s sweater.

“You’re besties with the God of Thunder, and you’re pretty bad-ass in your own right. What’s the worst that could happen?”

\----------------------------------

Later that night, when Darcy found herself alone in an alley facing the same goddamn cyborg assassin for the third fucking time, she cursed Jane for jinxing her.

“You gave me my name,” he said, holding her tight against a wall, “You’re going to help me get more.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was the hardest chapter to write by far. Mostly because Darcy and Bucky are finally interacting after fourteen chapters of build up, and I wanted to make sure it was worth it. I guess y'all will be the judge of that :)

“Long time no see, Bucky.”

Darcy wasn’t scared because, oddly, being cornered by this dude was becoming passé. Although the hold he had on her arm kind of smarted.

He seemed to realize that he was hurting her, immediately loosening his grip at her first squirm. Stepping back, he shook his head, clenching his metal fist with a subtle grinding noise and shaking his arms out. The cheap, thin button down shirt he was wearing was doing its best, but the seams were fit to burst. Not to mention how the pale yellow of the shirt totally clashed with the military cargo pants and his shit kicker boots.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said once there was a couple of feet between them.

Definitely enough room for her to get a shot off with her taser.

Her fingers twitched on her purse at the thought of her trusty weapon, and Bucky did a whole body flinch at the movement. For someone that had taken on a whole group of SHIELD agents with ease, it wasn’t the right reaction.

Making a show of pulling her bag off and carefully laying it on the ground, she held out her arms, palms up, Jesus style. He was stock still throughout the whole process, but kept his eyes glued to her every move.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.

She didn’t expect him to laugh, a soft and rusty thing. From the wide set of his eyes, she didn’t think Bucky expected it, either.

“If anyone’s going to make that promise, I think it should be me,” he said finally, voice hoarse.

“While I don’t doubt your physical prowess,” Darcy put her hands down and tried to casually lean against the wall, immediately regretting her attempts to look nonchalant because they were in an alley and alleys were grimy and gross, “I was definitely the one doing the hurting the other two times we met, dude.”

Bucky took a step towards her, frowning. “Two times? I don’t…” he stopped mid-sentence, that mechanical whir from his arm getting louder again.

“Yeah, two times, remember? Once in New Mexico, and then at Culver University, I stopped you from killing Betty Ross,” she said, monitoring just how close he was getting. The reminder of their prior encounters had her on guard, but the image of him sobbing on his knees in the destroyed lab kept over riding any of her unease. 

He’d been so broken.

“I don’t remember, I don’t…” he pulled at his hair, swaying hard, “There was snow…,” he looked up fiercely, “There was snow, and you gave me my name.”

He grabbed her hand, carefully this time, gently.

“Please, you gave me my name, I need more than my name, please help me, Oh God, please…” he begged, hugging her hand to his heaving chest.

Jane was going to kill her.

\--------------------------------------------- 

The giant cheeseburger was calling her name. Grass-fed American beef, melted cheddar, crisp lettuce, ripe tomatoes, salty pickles, all on a brioche bun…

Her stomach was growling at the smell alone.

If Darcy wasn’t back in five minutes, Jane was eating without her, friendship be damned.

She had just been running to the Walgreens down the street for toothbrushes and toothpaste; she should have been back before the room service was delivered, but Darcy had a long history of being distracted by the ‘As Seen on TV’ section with all of the infomerical junk. Jane avoided looking at the wedge cut fries, all golden and covered in cracked pepper.

This was torture.

\--------------------------------------------- 

**Today, 5:44 PM**  
_janie-pants. light of my life. my sister from another mister. my favorite human besides ina garten and that’s only because of my life goal of getting drunk with the barefoot contessa. something came up, and i won’t be back to the hotel tonight. but i’m fine! i’m being a good samaritan, and you shouldn’t be worried. i have to turn my phone off bc of reasons, but i’ll call you tomorrow. oh, and fluffernutter. that’s the safe word for i am a-ok, right? i’m 99% sure it’s that one. so, i repeat, fluffernutter._  
**Message Delivered**

\--------------------------------------------- 

Darcy shut off her phone after hitting send, as per her compromise with Bucky, and handed it to him as they walked down the street. 

After agreeing to help him, she’d persuaded him that the first step was getting him clothes that didn’t scream ‘terrorist’. He’d capitulated only on the caveat that she used cash because cards could be traced. Same reasoning went into having to turn her phone off and scrambling it or whatever he was now doing to it.

She hadn’t asked who would be doing the tracing.

There weren’t a lot of people out, too late for the work crowd and too early for going out, but there was enough foot traffic that they were drawing looks. They were in a nicer area with a lot of cute restaurants that were not helping Darcy ignore the fact that she hadn’t eaten since sushi on the jet, and the man at her side was not blending in his mismatched outfit and dirty Fabio hair. Bucky tensed at every wayward glance, eyes constantly shifting between different passerby. 

By the time they arrived at the bank, he had his metal fist clenched at the small of her back, an ironic gesture given how Darcy felt like she was the one doing the leading in their little duo.

“Ok,” she said, parking him at a bench outside with decent lines of sight into the building, “I’m going to go grab some cash. I’ll be right back, just stay put.”

“Good thinking, HYDRA’s facial recognition programs would pick me up on the bank cameras,” he intoned calmly, as if commenting on the chill in the air.

Darcy, however, was non-plussed.

“HYDRA?”

“Yes?” he questioned, “Who else would I be talking about?” Bucky crooked his head, frowning. It was the first emotion she’d seen on his face that wasn’t heartbreaking.

“I’m going to get cash,” Darcy glared, “On second thought, I am going to get a lot of cash because something tells me we’ll need it, but when I get back, we are having a discussion about pertinent information. Starting with those HYDRA fuckers.”

She had a finger waving in his face by the end of tirade, reminding her of old Sister Ernestine who had been her terrifying second grade teacher, but she couldn’t stop it.

Bucky went cross eyed staring at her finger before he looked past it to her. His limp hair was still hanging in his face, but it didn’t shade the small grin that broke across his mouth.

“You got it, doll,” he easily agreed, leaning back and stretching his flesh arm across the top of the bench.

“Good,” Darcy replied, thrown off. She nodded at nothing like an idiot, before shuffling away, one eye on him until she went through the door.

\---------------------------------------------

Jane had been so engrossed in devouring her meal that she hadn’t heard her phone go off.

It was only twenty minutes of wallowing on the couch later, weighed down by her food coma, that it dawned on her how late Darcy was in coming back. She rolled herself off the couch to go check her phone where it was charging by the bed, cursing her greasy fingers for the film they left on the screen.

After reading the message Darcy had sent, Jane started cursing her friend instead.

“Not worry, my ass,” she muttered to herself as she called Thor.

\---------------------------------------------

“So you were a brainwashed assassin for HYDRA?” Darcy asked as she straightened a blue cap she’d gotten at a convenience store on his head, tucking some of his hair behind his ear. Bucky stubbornly pulled the hair back into his face, scrunching his nose at her fussing.

“What the hell is brainwashed?” he asked, batting her hand away. Softly, of course.

She exaggerated scrunching her whole face back at him, blowing a raspberry, “Brainwashed, you know, methodically changing someone’s mind or memories through way unpleasant means. How do you not know that word?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I don’t remember a lot of things,” he pointed out.

She turned to call a cab, intent on getting to a department store before they closed, but kept talking over her shoulder. “You don’t remember things about yourself, sure, but you still have a decent vocabulary. And you know how to do stuff, obviously, like how to make my phone untraceable without destroying it.”

Quietly considering that, he watched her yell at a vacant cab that passed them up. As she flipped it the bird, he cautiously agreed, “I guess.”

“I know,” Darcy said, confidently throwing her hand out again to hail another taxi, “Brainwash is a common enough word, though. Unless you were around before the Korean War which, for your information, was when it was coined. Post-World War II American History 307 coming in clutch.”

A cab finally took pity on them and moved to pull over.

“What Korean War?” Bucky asked, puzzled.

The car stopped in front of them, and he reached to open the door for her with his left hand. Staring at the metal fist, a feat of science that should have been impossible, a prosthetic with such strength and articulation, Darcy suddenly realized that she probably shouldn’t be ruling anything out.

“Just what are the chances that you’re older than sixty, Buckaroo?” she asked as she climbed in.

“With the serum? Pretty good,” he said with a shrug.

She hit her head on the roof in surprise. 

“Serum?” she grumbled, rubbing the sore spot through her hair, “What did I say about pertinent information?”

He settled in, closing the door. “That I should share it.”

Giving him an incredulous look, she made quick work of sliding open the partition to tell the driver where to go, making sure to close it firmly so the cabbie wouldn’t overhear them before asking in a low voice, “Then why didn’t you do that?”

“I just did,” he whispered back guilelessly, but Darcy thought she saw amusement behind his eyes.

Maybe he couldn’t remember who he was, but she would bet her grandmother’s rosary that Bucky had been a little shit.

\---------------------------------------------

“Look, it’s not a great sign that she withdrew twenty grand in cash,” Clint sighed. Jane raised to the balls of her feet, and he shuddered with the memory of the last time he’d faced her anger in New Mexico. 

Except this time, he was in a sweet hotel suite instead of a cold desert, and he had Thor to step between them.

“If Darcy did such a thing, then it was for good reason. This I can assure you,” the Asgardian said, winding an arm behind him to keep his girlfriend where she was. Clint could still hear her spluttering obscenities.

“There’s no if about it,” he pulled up the footage from the bank and a copy of the transaction forms on the Tony’s tablet. Iron Man was busy coordinating with Pepper on how to handle the fallout of SHIELD’s collapse, Nat was taking one for the team in the Senate, Steve was still sleeping off his five hundred foot drop into the water, and Bruce was being a lazy turd. Not really, but Clint was pretty jealous that Banner got to stay cozy in the Tower while all of this crazy was happening here. “I believe that you think Darcy is good, but forgive me if I’m not so much with the trust right now. My entire life kind of got exposed as one huge fraud, so you’ll have to excuse my reservations about a woman dropping off the face of the Earth with a ton of money.”

At that, not even Thor with all of his godly power could hold back the tiny titan that was Jane. “Just what are you implying? That my best friend in the whole world is HYDRA? Because if that’s what you think, I can tell you where to shove it,” which was when Thor put a hand over her mouth.

“There is no reason to suspect anything foul of Darcy,” Thor warned, voice angry even as he struggled to contain Dr. Foster.

“That’s not true, and you both know it,” he stared them both down, waiting for Thor to release Jane, “There’s something off about Darcy, and you two are in on it. I’m not an idiot. I may be hard of hearing, but it’d be really difficult for me to have missed all the secret conversations and looks between the three of you. If I weren’t a, you know, freaking world class spy, maybe I’d chalk it up to some menage a trois deal, but again, I’m not an idiot.”

Thor didn’t blink, but Jane, for all of her intimidating rage, wasn’t so stoic. She sucked on her bottom lip and started tapping her fingers against her leg, left eyelid twitching from where she was fighting to maintain eye contact with him.

Pitiful.

“So are you guys going to enlighten me, or what?”

Both of them stayed silent; although Jane looked close to apoplexy.

“Ugh,” Clint tilted his head back and grunted at the ceiling, “I don’t actually think Darcy is HYDRA, okay? I like Darcy. And since it’s not exactly classified anymore, I can kind of prove it by saying that I was sent to evaluate her for SHIELD’s gifted people Index, but I definitely did not put her on there. Even though I am pretty sure she should be. You can trust me. I need to know whatever it is you guys aren’t saying so I can go find her.”

Jane let out the breath she’d been holding in a rush, looking up at Thor. For his part, Thor seemed just as unsure, quirking his mouth and lifting a shoulder questioningly. The good doctor turned back to him, and bit her lip. She didn’t look great, not that Clint would ever say that out loud, but her skin was wan and there were huge circles under her eyes.

She’d looked less rattled after being kidnapped, and Clint suddenly remembered Jane promising to take care of Darcy when he dropped her off the night Darce’s mom died.

“Ok,” she caved, sounding defeated and small, “Ok. The thing is…”

But she was interrupted by a ding from the forgotten tablet on the hotel table, an alert for the facial recognition program Clint had been running on Darcy.

“We’ve got a hit!” he said, choosing the immediate lead over whatever Jane had been about to divulge. There’d be time for secrets later. “Looks like it’s only an hour or so old, too.”

Of course, seeing the Winter Soldier buying socks with Darcy in a Nordstrom across town made him forget all about whatever they were hiding.

\---------------------------------------------

Bucky came out of the bathroom dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, hair damp from his shower and looking so much less like a haggard hobo now that he was clean. She was resolutely not looking at what those pants were doing for his thighs because she wasn’t a lust ruled teenager.

As he bent to pick up a sandwich from the room service cart, Darcy maybe had to flop back against the loveseat and throw her arm over her eyes, feigning exhaustion.

“You may have been right about this place. Shower was nice,” Bucky admitted through a mouth full of pastrami.

She cracked one eye open to see him smile at her, cheeks puffed out with food like a perfectly content chipmunk. He’d wanted to go the low rent motel route, but she’d won the argument in the end. Motels had thin walls, and if he wanted her help, what she did wasn’t exactly quiet. Maybe a penthouse suite at the Jefferson was a bit much, but she was tired, cranky, and knew that the hotel would keep her off the books with a big enough tip.

“If I’d known that a decent shower and food was the way to get on your good side, I’d have gone with that back in the lab instead of screaming.”

Bucky looked troubled as he gulped down the last bite, reaching for another sandwich as he asked, “How does that work, exactly? I’m still pretty fuzzy on what went down then.”

“Are you?” she stalled, “You seem way more with it now. With the grinning and being a general mook, and all.”

“Mook!” he laughed, triumphant, “I know that one! And yeah, I’m still fuzzy on memories, but everything isn’t so confusin’ now. It’s like the longer I’m awake, the more things kinda make sense.”

His words were getting a little rougher, clipping his g’s and hitting the r’s hard, but Darcy didn’t mention the accent. She figured it was best to just let it all develop naturally, anything was better than the pained monotone he’d started with today.

“Maybe they were giving you something to keep you docile or whatever?” she guessed.

“They were always givin’ me something, Darcy,” he rolled his eyes, chomping another huge bite of food. “Don’t think I don’t realize what you’re doin’, by the way, avoiding my question.”

“I said I’d help you,” she said with little guilt, “That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable giving you my life story.”

“Fair enough,” he said, licking some mustard from his thumb and sitting on the couch across from her, “But it does make your little pertinent information speech seem a bit hypocritical, don’t ya think?”

Darcy stared back cooly. “No, it really doesn’t. This isn’t pertinent. It has nothing to do with you and who you are.” She leaned forward, braced her arms on her knees, an obvious challenge.

Bucky mirrored her position, meeting her gaze with a slight tilt to corner of his lips.

“Understood, doll. Understood.”

\--------------------------------------------- 

“I don’t know what the Winter Soldier is! All I know is that the guy on the film is the one who attacked my lab! And now he has Darcy!” Jane screeched.

Clint had run to the Nordstrom with Thor, fully planning on grabbing Darcy and letting Thor do battle with the super assassin. Even Nat couldn’t take the Winter Soldier, and he was of the opinion that anything Nat couldn’t do, he definitely couldn’t do. Darcy, however, had been long gone. Unsurprising with who she had backing her up. Clint’d texted Nat about the sighting, but hadn’t heard back from her.

“We both know that Darcy would not be taken against her will,” Thor reasoned.

“I get that you’re supportive of your friend and all, buddy,” Clint argued, “But it’s not like she could have said no to an assassin.” He faced Jane, “ And how would you know that the Winter Soldier was the one who attacked your lab? You were supposedly at Walmart.”

Jane gulped, but was saved by a furious knocking on the hotel door, nearly taking the thing of its hinges. Thor called Mjolnir from the coffee table, and Clint fingered a knife sheathed under his shirt and went for the door.

He was not expecting to see Steve through the peep hole.

Cap slipped through as soon as the door cracked open, looking around wildly.

“You found Bucky?” he asked desperately. Clint made note of the hospital wrist band he was still wearing, and decided to ignore the fact that he was dressed in scrubs that were three sizes too small.

“Bucky?” Clint asked blankly, “And aren’t you supposed to be sleeping off being drowned?”

Having finished perusing the room and apparently not finding what he wanted, Steve turned back to him.

“Nat said you’d found Bucky. Where is he?” His eyes latched onto the video of Darcy and the Winter Soldier shopping that was still pulled up on the tablet. “There! Where was this? We need to go get him!”

“Captain, do you know this villain?” Thor queried while Jane stood there gaping at a deranged Captain America.

Steve scowled at Thor. “He’s not a villain! He’s my friend, and he needs my help! I need to find him!”

Clint felt a stress headache coming on. Feverishly wishing this god awful day would be over with already, he suggested “Maybe we should start from the beginning.”

\--------------------------------------------- 

Things were not going well.

Darcy had gotten them to MSS with little problem, she was long past finding that difficult or holding them there being draining, but bringing up the vision of that snowy mountain was proving to be difficult. It’d been so easy before, to just pluck it from where she could feel it burning on the edge of her awareness.

The problem was that, where before there had only been one pinprick of ice in the already chilly realm, now there were dozens. She’d called the first one she felt when they’d materialized there, while Bucky breathed a little harder, but still holding it together pretty well.

Then a window opened, and instead of a white mountain, there was a darkened living room with an older man sitting by a roaring fire, reading and listening to smooth music playing from a record player in the corner. He sipped an amber liquid from a crystal glass, and folded his newspaper neatly in his lap. The top right corner read December 27th, 1954, clear as day.

“Uh,” Darcy muttered, “That can’t be right.”

From the shadows, a figure emerged behind the old man in his wing backed chair, silently moving forward. The fire cast a warm glow to his features, and Darcy gasped when they showed a familiar face. It was absolutely Bucky, looking almost exactly the same apart from a few faint lines on his face.

The Bucky next to her watched himself strike, that metal hand wrapping around the old man’s neck before the man even registered that he wasn’t alone. The struggle was short, the old man no match for Bucky.

The window closed soon after that, and Darcy felt that slight tremor of doubt again as she stood next to the same man she had just watched murder someone in cold blood.

Except when she looked at Bucky, he was staring at his left arm, jaw clenched and eyes wet.

“I don’t remember that,” he rasped, “Why don’t I remember that? Why would I do that?”

She found herself wrapping her own pale hand around his silver one, squeezing it hard even though it dwarfed hers.

“I’m starting to think it wasn’t really you. Brainwashed, remember? HYDRA are some sick sons of bitches, Buck.”

He kept his gaze on their entwined hands, but held hers firmly. If his was trembling, neither of them mentioned it.

“Let’s try again?” she offered, not letting him go.

Heaving a fortifying breath, he nodded.

The next few windows held much the same. The fashions, the technology, the time periods all changed, ranging, from what Darcy could tell, from the fifties on up to present day, but all of them showed Bucky, expressionless and mechanical, killing person after person. Some were quick, a shot to the head from afar or a dose of powder in a drink, and some were bloody and long, a few because they put up a fight and a few because…

Darcy didn’t want to think about those.

Through it all, Bucky watched, unblinking and unflinching.

After what seemed like hours, finally a window opened with the bellow of a train horn, and she felt him tense.

Unlike last time, though, the train seemed to be intact, no huge hole blown through its side. They were inside one of the cars, where some kind of fire fight was taking place.

And there was Bucky, but he was young, clean shaven, and, you know, actually emoting. From the looks of things, he was mostly emoting a hell of a lot of anger. He caught a gun tossed from offscreen and nodded in that direction. A blue and red blur whizzed past him, and he popped up from the crates he was hiding behind, firing off quick shots.

“I had him on the ropes,” he said, good naturedly.

“I know,” came another man’s voice, tinged with the same accent in Bucky’s, and then Captain fucking America ambled up next to him.

Darcy’s world was white noise after that. She missed the rest of the scene, the blast that flung Bucky from the train and Steve Rogers clamoring to save him and failing.

She missed Bucky’s subtle weeping, tears pouring down his face, but remaining upright.

When she did tune back into the world, it was to throw her face into her palm.

“Holy fucking shit,” she said into her hand, so stunned she felt tingling in her fingers and they faded back into the hotel room, “You’re Bucky Barnes.”

He pulled her hand from her face, and cupped her jaw to tilt her head up to where he could meet her eyes.

“And who is that?” he asked.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I am using Zarathos, but no, Ghost Rider will not be making an appearance. I just needed a Mephisto minion :)

It'd been so long since he'd enjoyed the simpler things in life.

As Alexander Pierce cried out for the thousandth time, begging for a reprieve that would never come, Mephisto sighed in contentment.

This was the life.

\------------------------------

"I," Natasha paused on the other end of line, hesitant, which made Sam's panic increase tenfold.

He interrupted her before she could continue, "What the hell was he thinking? He almost drowned! His dumb ass had a concussion that would have killed anyone that didn't have his thick, supersoldiered skull! And what does he do? He breaks into some poor nurses locker, steals his clothes, and sprints out the front door!"

He paced up and down the hospital lobby, police giving him a wide berth. Steve hadn't answered his damn phone, and, good Lord, he'd lost _Captain America_.

"Sam," Natasha cut into his pity party, "I might know where he is."

"Oh, you might know, huh?" he parrotted, suspicion lacing his tone.

"Alright, I defnintely know where he is."

"You know, four days ago, I didn't even know any of you fools," Sam looked heavenward, asking for strength, "Where?"

\---------------------------- 

Mephisto's evening meditation over his writhing trophy was cut short by an unexpected development.

"My Lord," Zarathos, a demon who had proven his competence over a thousand or so years, "I have news of Loki."

The Demon King smiled. Today was really coming together marvellously.

After his tête-à-tête with that arrogant buffoon of an All-Father, he had coaxed most of what had happened with his daughter out of Odin.

Learning that Loki had laid hands on Darcy had sealed his fate in Mephisto's eyes. He had admired the chaos that the wayward prince had wrought, even admired the young frost giant's gumption, but he'd never respected the child.

For that was what Loki was, a child throwing tantrums with no greater aim. All that potential wasted on increasingly pathetic and outlandish attempts to teach Daddy a lesson.

Mephisto could only hope his own daughter had inheritted his pragmatism to override any similar tendencies.

Time would tell.

"And where is the young prince?"

"With the mad titan, sir. He's with Thanos."

There went Mephisto's perfect day.

\-----------------------------

"You didn't think, oh, I don't know, something like 'Hey, Sam went for some jello from the cafeteria, maybe disappearing and not answering my phone will give my friend a damn heart attack'!" the new guy yelled, hands on his hips and staring down the greatest soldier in history.

Said soldier was hunched over on the couch, looking anywhere but at the guy tearing him a new one.

"I'm sorry?" Steve went with, and Clint winced.

He tuned out Sam's response, knowing from his own experience with half-assed apologies that it wouldn't be pretty.

Thor and Jane were following his example and edged away from the spectacle.

"As nice as this suite is," he told them, "It's getting a little crowded."

Of course, that's when he heard the electronic lock disengage, swinging open to reveal Tony with Natasha right behind him.

"Gangs all here," Clint muttered, wondering if it would be worth it to bust out the beer from the minifridge.

Tony stopped in the doorway, clearly not expecting the crowd in front of him.

"Uh," he asked, observing Sam towering over a seated, cowering Steve and the far corner where Clint, Jane, and Thor had wedged themselves, "Did I miss something?"

Nat lifted to her toes and hooked her chin over Tony's shoulder.

"Seems normal to me," she said, smacking the gum she was chewing loudly in Stark's ear.

Tony blanched.

\------------------------ 

By 3 AM, Darcy had given up on sleep. The bed was wonderful, the pillows were fluffy, and she hadn't slept in forever, but she was too wound up.

Having a should-be-dead hero from seventy years ago in the next room did that to a girl.

She wanted desperately to call Jane.

Jane would know what to do, or at least she would be down for terrible late-night hotel television. Darcy'd tried, but it wasn't as fun by herself.

When she'd agreed to help Bucky, she'd promised him that she wouldn't contact anyone, not until she really needed to so they wouldn't worry. At the time, she did it to soothe what she thought was his paranoia, but now knew was his real and justified caution. She didn't want to break her promise, especially when it was just for her own comfort. It'd clearly been too long since anyone had put Bucky's needs first, and she didn't want to be the latest on that very long list.

Heaving a frustrated sigh, Darcy slipped from her bed, planning on making use of the balcony off the living room to get some fresh air, only to find Bucky sitting on the sofa, head back, eyes closed and mouth gaping slightly.

She froze, not wanting to wake him up, but he'd acknowledged her with a "Hey," before she could make a decision.

"Hey yourself," she said, grabbing a blanket from her bed and joining him, "You know, I payed a pretty penny for that bed in there. Had I known you'd snub it for a couch, I could have saved a fortune."

"Somethin' tells me you can afford it," he kept his eyes closed, but that smirk was making a comeback.

"Not the point," she stretched out her legs, bracing her back against an arm, and nudged his thigh with her cold toes, "You alright?"

He rolled his head towards her and finally opened his eyes.

"You know I'm not."

Darcy felt her face flush. "Well, yeah, grand scheme of things, you are not alright, but I meant, like, relatively?"

"Could ask you the same question. You're doin' an awful lot for a guy you have a good reason to hate," he lifted her feet into his lap, spreading the blanket so it covered all of her and his legs.

"I want to call my friend, Jane," Darcy sighed, something about the quiet around them, the soft light of the moon outside, prompting her honesty.

Bucky tensed. "Yeah. Of course, you do. You're probably scared to death," he moved to push her feet from his lap, but she dug her heels in. Literally, and maybe a little too hard in such a sensitive area given the soft grunt Bucky couldn't quell.

"Oops, I'm sorry! I just didn't want you to move them. You're pretty warm," she rushed to apologize, watching as Bucky took deep breaths, "Also, you're not that scary."

"There is literally no one who would agree with you," he said hoarsely, still stiff.

"I bet Steve would," she said.

Impossibly, he got even stiffer.

"You know Steve?" he asked, hands clenched in top of her legs.

"Totally. Well, not really," Bucky glared at her, "I mean, I indirectly know him and can absolutely get in touch with him. It's why I want to call Jane. She can get Steve."

She let Bucky ruminate on that and shimmied so she's laying down, curled on her side, her bottom half even more draped over him. He let her.

"I don't," he started, but shook his head, "No. Not yet. I want to know more before..." he trailed off, and then switched gears. "You said earlier that he was famous. That we were famous, Captain America and Bucky Barnes. If he's so famous, how do you know him?"

It's a poor deflection, but she didn't mind giving him more time to figure things out.

"He is super famous, sure, but I know a guy. Well, a god, more accurately."

Bucky blinked at that.

"I don't understand half of what comes outta your mouth, Darce."

"Eh, you’ll get used to it,” she wiggled her feet into his lap, laughing at his wince. She snuggled into the cushion she was using as a pillow, and despite her insomnia earlier, she fell right to sleep.

\------------------------------------

“If someone had told me she was missing, I could have helped,” Tony complained as he led the team into Stark Industries' DC location.

“I thought that Clint had done so,” Thor answers, sending Clint a dirty look like this was remotely his fault.

“Me?” he huffed, “It’s your friend that was missing! I assumed you sent that text to the whole team!”

“Focus,” Steve ordered, shutting them all up as they filed into a large elevator. Jane had to stand on Thor’s toes for them all to fit, and Clint got shoved into Sam's back by Natasha. "And Nat, could you please stop popping bubbles at everyone?"

"It's your fault, do you know how much gum I had to buy from that vending machine? They'd just restocked. You owe me twelve bucks, Rogers," Nat blew a bubble as big as her face and snapped it at Steve.

He wisely shut himself up after that.

Predictably, it was Tony that broke the silence as they reached their floor and exited into a marble floored hallway.

“Who tries to find someone using only a damn tablet?”

“It was all we had!” Clint exploded.

“Well, now we have a hell of a lot more to work with,” Tony said as he threw open the doors, waving them all into a spacious room. “JARVIS?”

“Hello, sir,” came the AI’s familiar voice, and several hologram displays lit up in various spots.

“We’ve got a needle to find,” Tony declared.

\------------------------------------

If he were on a mission, he'd be asleep right now. He was in a secure location with downtime, protocol dictated that he eat and rest so as to perform optimally.

Which is why he wasn't sleeping. It wasn't rational, not even a little bit, but Bucky was starting to like rebellion in all of its forms. Not to mention that there was no telling what images his mind would drag up after tonight. He tried to recall anything other than him being a mindless automaton, a weapon wielded by evil men.

He could feel them, memories hanging on by a thread, but he couldn't reach them. There were a few that he could see, blurry and faded, but still there. Almost all of them were of Steve.

Steve, the small one, his friend, curled up on a single cushion on a wooden floor that creaked every time they moved; Steve wiping blood from the corner of his mouth and laughing like a loon; that damn train and all that snow.

Everything in his head was in fragments, rattling around, incomplete and out of order. Still, he knew Steve would help him, knew it with a certainty that felt foreign, but it didn't feel _right_. 

Maybe it was going into a situation where he didn't know all the variable or have all the information, or it might have been simply too much pressure to face Steve's earnest face, 'you know me' ringing in Bucky's ears when, in actuality, Bucky didn't remember him, not really.

A tug at his fingers had him looking down to find that a loose string from the blanket had gotten caught in one of the metal plates. Pulling it free, he realized he must have been absentmindedly stroking Darcy's legs.

She'd fallen asleep hours ago, just laid down next to him and closed her eyes, like it was nothing. Like he couldn't break her in a million different ways.

Darcy knew he could, though, with exacting clarity. She'd watched him do it to how many others that very night.

And yet...

Here she slept.

He curled a hand around one of her ankles, laid his head back, careful not to disturb her, and thought it was probably time for him to do the same.

 _'He'd slept in worse places,'_ Bucky thought to himself as he drifted off, _'Hell, there was that one time with the cow manure and that guy in a bowler hat...'_

\------------------------------------

"I still don't understand why Bucky would go after her," Steve asked again, more muttering to himself as he scoured security footage.

Clint and Natasha shared a look as Jane let out a shrill giggle, then immediately darted to the other side of the room.

"So are we going to address that?" Nat asked him, as she went through hotel bookings for the third time.

"I tried," Clint said, dialing another motel to ask if someone fitting Darcy's description had checked in. They had to be sleeping somewhere, and Darcy didn't strike any of them as the roughing it type.

Then again, maybe the Winter Soldier had convinced her to go off the grid. It was mid-morning, and they'd been at this all night with no luck.

"Hm," Nat drawled, twisting to turn a calculating eye on Dr. Foster where she was talking to Tony across the room.

Clint snorted, "Good luck with that."

"I wouldn't need luck, she'd crack," Natasha scoffed.

"Yeah," he agreed, "But right before she was going to spill the beans, the universe would intervene and save her ass. It's like clockwork, I swear to God."

"I am not religious," she said and stood up, ready to make her way to Jane.

She'd only gotten a few steps before Tony chirped, "Got her! She's at the... Smithsonian? What the hell, why does her kidnapping keep looking more and more like a field trip?"

"It doesn't matter," Steve said as he rushed for the door, manic from too little food and sleep, "Let's go!"

As he passed Nat, Clint leant down to whisper in her ear, "See? Like clockwork."

She stuck her tongue out at him.

\----------------------------------------- 

"Are you sure this is a good idea, doll?" Bucky asked, pulling up the collar of his jacket and ducking his face behind it as an adorable little girl in a Captain America helmet and a tutu zipped past them.

"Yes," rolling her eyes, she flipped his collar back down, "Come on, Nosferatu. It's better to get the low down from a more accurate source than what I remember from college combined with Wikipedia."

He stubbornly popped his collar again, but dutifully followed her deeper into the exhibit.

Despite what she told Bucky, Darcy wasn't actually sure that this was the right move. She couldn't say that she understood why Bucky didn't want to talk to Steve, but she trusted that he knew his own limits. In light of that, the exhibit was the best option Darcy could come up with, short of getting mind meltingly drunk and forgetting his sorrows for a bit.

She was saving that one for if this outing proved disastrous.

The front of the hall was entirely dedicated to Steve, unsurprising given that this was his exhibit, and Bucky spent a good while reading everything he could about his old friend. Wisely, Darcy let him be, standing close beside him to remind him he wasn't alone.

When they entered the second room and were bombarded by a massive mural of the Howling Commandos, a young James Buchanan Barnes staring off from the wall, Bucky choked on a gasp. The noise caught the attention of an older couple ahead of them, and they looked around curiously. Darcy quickly linked her arm with Bucky's, hugging him close and leading him over to a bench.

"It's alright, hey," she cooed, setting him down and practically sitting in his lap, she was huddled to him so tightly.

Bucky wasn't tearing up like she thought he would be, but he was shaking hard. He tore the blue baseball cap from his head, and ran his metal hand through his hair.

"Buck?" she asked, gently cupping his cheek and guiding his head to face her. There wasn't much space between them, but Darcy thought the closeness might help him focus.

He blinked, long eyelashes fluttering against the delicate purple skin under his eye. She was shocked when he leant forward and rested his forehead against hers, but kept from jumping.

"That's me, Darce, that's me," he shuddered, breath washing over her.

She moved her hand from his cheek to cradle the back of his head.

"Yeah," she whispered back, "That's you. Bucky Barnes, total bad ass and war hero."

Bucky's trembling had stopped, Darcy noted distantly, but she was finding it hard to concentrate on anything that wasn't the two blue eyes boring into her own.

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, was near enough to see Bucky's pupils dilate ever so slightly. The tension had come out of no where, but Darcy knew it wasn't the time. She eased back slowly, keeping her hands on him so it wouldn't seem like she was shutting him out. But Darcy wasn't so selfish as to take advantage of him like this, not here.

Bucky, for his part, flicked his gaze down to her lips once, comfortingly confirming it wasn't just her feeling the chemistry, but backed off, too.

She smiled at him, ready to lead him back in, when he suddenly looked over her shoulder through the doorway to the beginning of the exhibit.

"We have company."


	17. Chapter 17

Darcy was proud that she didn’t immediately crane her neck around, even though that’s what her instincts were demanding now that they were on alert.

“Who?” she asked under her breath, carefully getting up without breaking Bucky’s view of the entrance. She shored up her nerves and put on a sultry smile, giggling loudly. She started pushing him to a door marked _Employee’s Only_ , hoping that anyone watching would think they were any young couple looking for a bit of privacy.

Bucky caught on quickly, throwing his arm low around her waist and letting her guide him back, burying his face in her neck like he was nuzzling, but instead softly talking in her ear while keeping an eye out.

“HYDRA by the looks of them, small team, probably more coming.”

Not having to fake the shiver that ran down her from the way his lips tickled her skin as he spoke, Darcy playfully shoved him backwards into the door.

“Then let’s get out of here, soldier,” she cooed to the disgust of an older gentleman who shuffled away from their affectionate display. Darcy went back into Bucky’s chest to give him cover as his metal arm broke the lock on the door, both of them slipping through hastily.

It was the entrance to the employee parking garage, but they didn’t get more than a few steps before men with guns came out from their hiding places. Bucky shoved Darcy behind him and pulled a gun from Frigga knew where to take aim at the man stalking forward from the rest of the formation. Darcy moved her head from behind his back to get a better view.

“Rollins,” Bucky sneered.

“Winter Soldier,” the man, Rollins ,replied, “Time to come home. Lucky you, I got orders to take your girlfriend, too.”

“You didn’t bring enough to take us,” Bucky said, which Darcy thought was optimistic considering there were like fifteen dudes with big ass guns, not to mention the group inside. She could just shift them to MSS, secret identity be damned in the face of immediate danger, but Bucky seemed to sense her plan because he gave her a warning squeeze with the arm holding her back and nodded ‘no’.

“Don’t need that many,” Rollins laughed, letting his gun drop, “Just need one word: Sputnik.”

And with that, Bucky crumpled into a lifeless heap at Darcy’s feet. She was on her knees soon after, hands hovering, unsure what to check on him first, when she heard the unmistakable cock of a gun.

“Up, little lady. Or not. You could make this more fun for me; it’s not often I get called out to grab pretty things like you,” came Rollin’s lecherous voice.

Darcy’d been in dangerous situations before, against gods and monsters, but having the helpless man underneath her fingertips and the knowledge that the men in front of her were responsible for all of the hurt that he’d suffered, that they were going to do it all again to him and probably to her, made her blood boil.

She felt rage build within her, the likes of which she’d never felt, and took a deep breathe that tasted like ice and sulphur.

Her vision was blanketed in black gossamer, her body chilled to the touch, all the while that rage surged through her.

She looked up at Rollins and smiled.

\---------------------------------

Stark Industries’ DC office had a fleet of armored black SUVs, all meant for SHIELD but now with no place to go. Convenient, given the Avengers had confiscated one of them for their high speed drive towards the Smithsonian.

Nat was absently weighing the pros and cons of later stealing one of those cars as she scrolled through police chatter on her phone. If the Winter Soldier went on a rampage, it was better that they knew before rushing in blindly, exactly what Rogers would do without her foresight. Sooner or later, she’d have him thinking with his head rather than his hormones, but Natasha had her work cut out for her until then.

She heard the hard whisper of Sam convincing Steve to change into normal clothes from where they were stuffed in the trunk space, “You really want to greet your long lost BFF in turquoise scrubs?”, and snorted to herself, feeling the arm of something soft, a hoodie maybe, swat her in the back of the head. Her phone caught her attention soon enough. There was a bank being robbed by armed men exactly two miles East of the Smithsonian and a bomber with hostages in a hotel lobby exactly two miles North.

“That can’t be a coincidence,” she muttered, but Jane, who was seated next to her in the back seat, heard.

“What can’t be a coincidence?”

Nat explained the perfectly equidistant disasters over the muffled sounds of Sam and Steve tossing clothes around.

“That’s a distraction. Pulls police presence in two directions away from the Smithsonian,” Clint thought out loud.

“HYDRA. They’re going for Bucky,” Tony concluded, pressing a few buttons, and suddenly they weren’t on the street anymore.

“Are we flying?” Jane asked through gritted teeth.

“Aye,” Thor confirmed from the passenger side in the front, cramped even with the roomiest seat in the car.

“Why weren’t we already doing that?” Jane glared a hole into the back of Tony’s head.

“It’s not exactly inconspicuous, Janie dear,” Tony said but got a swift punch in the arm from Jane for his condescension. Natasha smiled approvingly and patted her knee as a reward. Jane never lifted her glare from Tony, but gave a quick nod to the spy.

“Who gives a fuck about being inconspicuous?!” roared Cap from the trunk, furiously trying to get his head through the appropriate hole in a T shirt, but had twisted it around his torso too far. The rip echoed in the car.

“Right, on it, ETA 3 minutes,” Tony says, chastened.

Nat popped another piece of bubble gum and checked her gun, not missing the way Jane gave it a longing look before glancing back at Tony.

\---------------------------------

His body was filled with lead.

At least, that’s what it felt like. Bucky could still hear everything around him, could still feel everything, but his eyes were glued shut, and he couldn’t move.

Distantly, the thought that being immobilized should be panicking him occurred because immobilization had always meant incredible pain, but all of his panic was usurped for the woman who’s warm hand he could feel resting on his back.

Darcy.

Why wasn’t she running?

Why wasn’t she leaving?

Why wasn’t she going to that other place, the place where she could be safe?

Why?

Why… was it so quiet?

Actually, no, he could hear footsteps, fifteen of them so HYDRA’s men, their footsteps… backing up?

That wasn’t right. He tried to wrench his eyelids open, to see what was happening, but to no avail. Darcy’s warmth left his back.

Then the screaming started.

It was so loud, from every angle, that he almost missed the tingling in his fingers, feeling slowly creeping back into them.

The only thing keeping him sane was that the screaming wasn’t Darcy’s high, nasally husk, all of the yells were deeper baritones. Bucky frantically kept trying to move his hands, anything, but was only capable of frenzied twitching. An improvement, but he needed more; he had to help her.

Finally, Darcy’s voice broke through the chaos, right when Bucky got his arms to move like he wanted them.

“Boy, did you guys pick the wrong girl,” her voice rang out, relieving him to no small degree even if there was something wrong with it. More vibrato than she normally had, a little louder, but definitely still Darcy’s.

Bucky finally got his eyes to open, only to find his girl standing over him, normally porcelain complexion covered in red swirls that writhed in waves down her exposed skin and her blue eyes now black all over from lid to lid, the soldiers edging away from her and shakily pointing their weapons with sweating, trembling hands.

It was the most beautiful sight Bucky’d ever seen.

\---------------------------------

There were two dudes in the back that were literally pissing in their pants, and the rest reeked of fear.

Darcy loved it.

She hadn’t known how caged she was before, before her anger let the beast free. She could see, could feel so much more. Never had she understood what the big difference between species was, aside from Asgardians glowing a little more than your usual human, but she got it now that it was painted right in front of her face.

These were humans, _mortals_ , and terrible ones at that; their auras wafting from them clouded with every bit of death and pain they’d caused seeping from their every pore, all for Darcy to witness.

It was liberating.

“You’re covered in it, you know,” she drawled casually as she strolled towards Rollins. He was just as scared as the rest of them, bitter to her nose, but was trying to hide it. 

Men and their pride.

He raised his gun, shouldering it more securely, but Darcy wasn’t bothered. She could disappear before he landed a shot, of that she’s positive. Bucky’s energy was coming back, steady and sweet at her back. It shouldn’t be long before he’s up and mobile.

“Covered in what?” Rollins spat at her.

“Death, duh,” she laughed, stopping just short of the muzzle and looking up at him from under her lashes, “It’s fitting.”

“You’re talking crazy,” he stuttered, “I don’t care what you are, bitch, but get on the ground before I blow your brains out.”

She ignored him and continued, “It’s fitting that you’re so familiar with death because I’m going to gift you with yours.”

He flinched, just a brief tightening of his jaw and clenching of his teeth, but it’s enough. His men have moved back so far that Darcy’s confident Bucky’s out of the range of fire.

Pushing the barrel into her chest, Rollins said, “I’ll kill you before you kill me.”

“You misunderstand,” she hummed in that perfect pitch, the one that blinks her out of sight and straight to MSS.

She watched Rollins gape at empty air, watched some of the men turn tail and flee as she walked the few feet to reappear just behind his shoulder.

The scream someone let off as she rematerialized was music to her ears. Rollins didn’t have time to twist around before she was humming in his ear, hand around his throat, “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to show you exactly how you die so you walk around for the rest of your life looking over your shoulder: cursed, a paranoid and broken wreck of a man.”

With that, she stole him to MSS, one look confirming that Bucky was standing and ready to do his own special brand of damage.

\---------------------------------

Bucky was choking out the last of the remaining men, the ones that hadn’t run for the hills like cowards, when the wall of the parking garage collapses inwards, revealing a blonde man with a raised hammer behind it.

“Uh,” Bucky stalled, looking from the newcomer to the purpling HYDRA agent in his arms. He let the man drop and fell into a fighting stance, a default in the face of the unknown threat.

More people, and one shiny red and gold robot, crowded in the gaping hole behind the blonde behemoth, and, to Bucky’s horrified surprise, Steve came pushing through the rubble.

Mercifully, Steve got shoved aside by a small brunette woman running full tilt towards Bucky, yelling her head off.

“Where is Darcy?! Where is she?!”

Dropping out of his aggressive stance, the Winter Soldier went on the defensive against a woman who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred-twenty, but her aim was true and her fists were sharp.

He was saved by Darcy herself, who chose that moment to pop out of thin air with a sobbing and prostrate Rollins in all her otherworldly glory.

The woman, who Bucky had to assume was the infamous Jane, immediately stopped her assault in favor of dashing to Darcy, stepping on Rollins rather than over him in her hurry, landing a hard heel to his upper back. Once she was within arms reach and close enough to have a proper look, Jane halted suddenly, seizing Darcy’s face and dragging it down to her own.

“Darce,” she began, squeezing the face between her hands so hard that Darcy cheeks and lips puffed out like a fish, “Did you know that your eyes are totally black and your skin is doing a red watercolor impressionist thing right now?”

“No,” Darcy replied through her puckered mouth, “I did not. That’s new.”

“Huh,” Jane said, and then threw her arms around Darcy for a tight hug. Darcy returned it, and as they stood there holding each other, Darcy’s features faded back into her normal human self.

“So definitely not my daughter,” the robot said from the hole in the wall.

The red head that had been on the bridge, the little spider, answered while holstering her gun, “Still could be. Maybe she got that from her mother?”

The robot groaned.

“Bucky?” snapped his attention from eavesdropping, and there Steve was, standing there with a hopeful smile that made him look like such a dope.

Like a…

“Punk,” Bucky sighed, “You’re a punk.”

Steve laughed, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “And you’re a jerk,” he returned, voice only slightly waterlogged.

\---------------------------------

Mephisto had always hated space. It was so… unending.

Perhaps that was a quality that would impress someone who couldn’t traverse the multiverse at their leisure, but seeing as he could, unending just seemed messy.

Still, he had to admit that the Titan’s rocky outcrop was good for dramatic effect. The floating throne was maybe over the top, but Mephisto was realistic enough to know he didn’t have a leg to stand on. His own throne was made from the gilded bones of his enemies. The golden skeleton parts shone brilliantly in the light of hell-fire.

The throne before him was empty, but Mephisto knew its master to be about.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” he called out, “It’s so uninviting, truly inspired.”

“Mephisto. Now what deal could have enticed you all the way to my domain? Surely you know my soul is my own,” came his reply.

Thanos walked out from a hidden chamber, door blending smoothly into the stoneface after it swung shut. The floating chair lowered, presumably so it could be used, but Mephisto cut Thanos off at the pass.

“This may come as a shock to you, but your soul is of little value to me beyond how entertaining it would be to extinguish,” Mephisto smiled sweetly then offered a hand to help the Titan to his seat like he was helping a child to their chair for dinner. Thanos growled and sent the throne back to it’s high sentry.

“You show great disrespect. I would watch your tongue.”

“This is me watching it, Thanos. You are harboring an enemy to my realm. Release Loki to me.”

“Your realm?” Thanos scoffed, pacing along the ledge, “You think so small, of realms. It will be your downfall. Loki is long gone from here; I assume off scheming and simpering as usual.”

“I know he was here, and he cannot be far off. Give me the prince.”

“As I said, I know not where he is,” Thanos repeated, “Though I wonder what crime he could have committed against Hell? Asgard, surely, along with Jotunheim and Midgard, but Hell? What connection could there be?”

Mephisto remained quiet, calculating. How much did Thanos know?

“This was brazen, even for you with all your flamboyance. What could make you act so foolishly?” the Titan continued, pacing all the while.

“Do not forget your place. I am a King,” Mephisto warned.

Thanos stopped in front of him, cracking a hard grin. “King, eh? The age of kings is over, demon. It’s a new day. The dawn of a Titan.”

Not able to restrain the laugh, Mephisto chuckled. “Do you have any idea how many snot nosed little brats have tried to take me on? Please,” he chided, “Like you’re the first.”

Thanos tightened his fist, brandishing the gauntlet adorning his hand, but Mephisto took note of the lack of infinity stones, six empty holders.

“Oh, I am just shaking in fear. Whatever shall I do?” Mephisto intones, peering at the gauntlet, “Maybe if you actually had the stones to power it, but really? What use is a bow without an arrow?”

“Soon enough, devil,” Thanos seethed, “I’ll have so much more than arrows. I do not have your prize, so leave now.”

“If I find that you are keeping me from Loki, I will be back, and I won’t be quite so pleasant,” was Mephisto’s parting shot as he faded into the shadows of the rocks.

In truth, the meeting had only proven what Mephisto already knew to be true.

He must find a way to get to Darcy.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. I start law school on Monday. That means updates will not be as prompt as they have been, but never fear, I'm sticking with this sucker until the end.
> 
> ALSO: I would seriously die if anyone drew Banshee!Darcy art!!! IT WOULD BE THE BEST THING TO EVER HAPPEN.

"When you say red, how red are we talking? Like she was just flushed after running around?" he asked, shoving a bite of pancake in his mouth and washing it down with a slurp of coffee, sloshing some on the table in the process. Sam grimaced at where Clint had spilled on a corner of his own breakfast, coffee soaked omelette not being the most appetizing thing. They’d all headed back to the hotel straight from the Smithsonian, not wanting to hang around for the police or whatever alphabet agency that was bound to show up. The Avengers didn’t need to give the government any more ammo to use against them.

Natasha rolled her eyes which Clint thought was a little much. It wasn’t his fault that he’d missed Darcy shape shift or whatever, he and Sam had had their hands full with the HYDRA agents in the exhibit. Fighting dudes and not breaking the priceless Captain America memorabilia was harder than you would think.

Tony was ignoring the rest of them, sipping from some disgusting green sludge drink and tapping away on his tablet. The four of them could hear Jane yelling at Darcy through the closed door of one of the bedrooms in the suite but were doing their best to ignore it. Thor was in there, probably just aiming his disappointed face at Darcy from behind Jane, but Clint wasn’t sure why Cap and his long lost BFF were in there, too. Well, the Winter Soldier had refused to leave Darcy’s side while Steve acted like he was scared Bucky would disappear if he looked away for a second, but Clint still wouldn’t be in the same room as an angry Jane for anything.

"In terms that your bird brain will understand," Natasha began while wiping the corner of his mouth with her napkin like he was a baby, "Poison Ivy in the New 52? With the tattoo  
swirls all over her green skin? Like that, but red and the lines are blurry and constantly  
moving."

Clint let that sink in, forever amused at Nat’s varied interests, before nodding. "That's hot."

Natasha rolled her eyes again.

\-----------------------------------

On the one hand, Jane’s rampage had held the Avengers off from locking her away for being a demon spawn. Although, it occurred to Darcy that they probably didn’t know that she was straight up part demon, so maybe they wouldn’t lock her up, but …

Questions better left for another time.

_“Because it was so smart to just run off with the guy that tried to kill you numerous times before, yeah, genius move, Darcy Anne Lewis, totally not a bone head, fucking terrible idea! And…”_

On the other hand, Jane was really mad. Thor wasn’t helping, he was just standing there with his stupid bulging arms crossed and frowning at her, looking like a hurt puppy. Combined with her best friend’s obvious worry, it all made her chest clench. She looked down at her hands where they rested on the duvet and heaved a shuddering sigh.

A cold metal hand engulfed her own, gently cradling it. Darcy looked at Bucky seated next to her on the bed from the corner of her eye.

_“...fiscally irresponsible to draw out that much cash at once! I don’t care if you’re mega rich, what if someone had robbed you or you had dropped the cash in a puddle or…”_

Bucky had been right next to her almost since she’d brought Rollins back from MSS, silently leaning into her bubble, never straying. She didn’t know if it was because he didn’t trust all the people around him, or if it had something to do with the man standing off to the side of Jane and Thor.

Darcy turned her gaze on Captain America, only to find him staring intently at her and Bucky’s clasped hands. His face was blank, but there was a small tick in his jaw. Bucky hadn’t said anything to him that she had noticed, even though she thought she saw them talking while she had been hugging Jane. Recalling how adamant Bucky’d been about not contacting Steve, Darcy wasn’t surprised that Bucky was not engaging.

_“...I had to deal with Tony Stark to get you back. Do you know how annoying that man is? Like if we hadn’t found you soon, I would have murdered a billionaire and then we’d have to run away to Asgard and we’d never be able to come back to Earth and we would have lived the rest of our lives without pizza or burgers or coffee! Is that what you want, Darcy…”_

Leaving the Steve mystery for another time, she tuned back into Jane’s ranting but gave a squeeze to Bucky’s fingers. She felt him shuffle closer.

\-----------------------------------

Bucky was conflicted about Darcy’s friend, Jane. Or really, he was conflicted about her tirade. It was clearly upsetting Darcy; she was wearing the guilt on her face for everybody to see. It was strange to him, the idea of showing your every emotion on the surface, but he also couldn’t imagine Darcy with the cold, blank faces that he was used to. Just the idea was enough to make him feel sick.

Darcy was vibrant and loud. She was alive.

Her friend’s yelling was making her sad, and that was squarely Bucky’s fault. He wasn’t unfamiliar with guilt, but the last few days had been filled with a distant version of it. Yes, he’d done horrible things, but he didn’t remember them, not yet, and that created a distance that shielded him from fully feeling it.

This, with Darcy? He remembered it, was completely himself while causing it, and the knowledge burned in his throat.

He moved even closer to her at the thought, bringing their hands into his lap when there was no longer any space between their thighs. His movements went unnoticed by the yelling woman, but not the two other men in the room. Thor cocked his head, looking like we was going to speak but quickly closed his mouth at a glare from Darcy. He resumed his frowning.

Steve, on the other hand, hunched his shoulders up to his ears. Bucky could see him in his peripherals but refused to look directly.

After all, Steve was the reason he was conflicted about Jane’s yelling. The woman was so forceful in her mission that Steve hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise. 

Part of Bucky knew it was wrong, that Steve just wanted to help, but Bucky couldn’t…

It wasn’t fair. Steve looked at him and knew exactly who he had been. Bucky looked at Steve, and only could grasp fragments, fragments that left his mind feeling more broken than before.

Bucky couldn’t do it, couldn’t let Steve in. 

Not yet. 

Not when he still didn’t know who he was.

\-----------------------------------

“Barton,” Tony drawled, lazily scrolling his finger down the screen on his tablet, “Wanna share with the class how you missed that Darcy was super?”

Clint groaned from his seat on the couch next to Sam while Nat went to read the file over Tony’s shoulder. She was surprised by what she found.

“They sent you to evaluate her for the Index?” she asked Clint, confused that he hadn’t mentioned this earlier. “How did you miss her?”

Hawkeye had a nearly perfect record for dealing with gifted or superpowered people. Nat could not understand how he could have missed this. Watching him squirm and mutter something about “big eyes” made her realize that he hadn’t.

“You lied to Coulson,” she said, shocked. She would have continued, perplexed beyond measure as to why he would choose to keep Darcy hidden, but Sam interrupted before she could.

“Index? What is that?” he asked, leaning forward.

“A list,” Natasha said mechanically, Tony still perusing the files next to her, “A list of potential threats.”

“Potential threats,” Sam echoed while Clint fidgeted next to him, unable to meet Natasha’s eyes.

“Yes,” she answered, looking at Sam, “It’s so SHIELD could monitor people with special skills or powers and intervene when necessary.”

“Huh,” Sam said thoughtfully, tone low, “These people? They’re criminals? People who have tried to do bad things?”

Natasha observed him. “Sometimes,” she said after a beat.

“So you group people up, all people, even ones who haven’t done anything, and tell them what they can and can’t do for the rest of their lives?”

“Yes,” she answered, wary. Natasha had spent all of yesterday defending herself and others in the Senate. She didn’t want to have to do it here, amongst teammates, all over again.

She was tired.

Sam, though, had a disbelieving anger energizing him.

“Gee, wonder why that sounds familiar. Oh, right, isn’t that what Nazis did back in the day?”

“That’s different,” Nat said, restraining herself from clenching her fists.

“Is it? Because I feel like we just got through fighting a bunch of Nazis that were hidden inside SHIELD,” Sam responded sarcastically.

Natasha wondered why the hell Clint wasn’t helping her explain this. He’d been a part of SHIELD, he knew the score, and she really didn’t want to have this argument right now.

Help, however, came from an unlikely source.

Tony chimed in, “So maybe it shouldn’t be SHIELD, but the Index is that watch list you mentioned back with all the Loki shit, on the hellicarier before it all went to hell, right? You said that we were all on it.”

“We are. We’re dangerous,” Nat confirmed.

“And you’re okay with that?” Sam asked, letting himself rest back into the couch, seemingly over his incredulity and just as tired as Natasha.

“Yes,” she said, conviction not wavering. Tony shrugged, agreeable for him.

Clint looked down at his feet, not answering.

\-----------------------------------

Steve tried to cut in while Dr. Foster paused to breathe, “Maybe Bucky and I could go…”

The doctor shoved a finger in his face so quickly that her nail nicked the tip of his nose, drawing a small welt on his skin.

“Shut it, Spangles!”

She turned back to Darcy.

“And another thing! Who just sends a text when they go off with a brainwashed assassin? WHO TEXTS THAT AND DOESN’T FUCKING CALL?”

Darcy put her head between her knees and breathed deep.

\-----------------------------------

Tony kept reading on his tablet while everyone else stewed, silence occasionally broken by Jane’s loud voice.

“That’s not good,” Tony muttered to himself.

Desperate for a change of subject, Natasha pounced on the opportunity.

“What’s not good?” she asked, noting that Sam and Clint seemed just as happy to be on another topic.

“HYDRA had a capture order on Darcy. They sent the Winter Soldier to get her months ago,” Tony answered, squinting at the screen, “But it isn’t complete.”

“So? Maybe they got lazy on their filing,” Sam suggested, yawning into his fist.

“No,” Clint corrected, “Files have to be filled out and finished, all in a specific way. Failure to do so flags the file itself as a security issue. Pain in the ass, but a good system to keep things safe.”

“So an unfinished file is weird?” Sam asked.

“Try unheard of,” Natasha said, again reading over Tony’s shoulder, “Especially since this was an order from Alexander Pierce.”

“It doesn’t say who,” Tony said, question unasked.

“It’s from the head of the chain of command within HYDRA, that was Pierce,” she clarified.

“Official report said Jane and Darcy weren’t onsight in that attack, but it was right after that that they quit unexpectedly,” Clint added speculatively.

“Winter Soldier took out a squadron of planes, me, and Captain America and hardly broke a sweat. You’re telling me they survived the man that did that?” Sam said.

“Makes sense,” Clint shrugged.

“I beg to differ,” Nat argued.

“No,” Sam agreed with Clint, “It could make sense. Depends on what Darcy can do…”

They all turned to look at the door that hid the girl in question from them, all of them undoubtedly remembering Rollins weeping and shivering at Darcy’s feet.

“Spooky,” Tony said, shaking his head, before turning back to the tablet, “But I don’t like unanswered questions.” He pulled up footage from the night Pierce ordered the attack.

He watched, eyes going big, and then shoved the tablet around for everyone to watch Pierce suddenly appear out of thin air, asleep with his head on his desk. 

“Spookier,” he declared, watching everyone else’s shocked reactions.

“The footage could be tampered with?” Clint asked hopefully.

“It’s not,” Tony answered, “Plus, we saw Darcy do the same thing not an hour ago, materialize from nowhere.”

“There has to be something else,” Natasha said, yanking the tablet out of Tony’s hands and ignoring his indignant yelp, fingers flying furiously across the screen, “Sensor picked up an abnormal heat signature.”

“Someone hiding from the cameras?” Tony asked.

Natasha, registering the actual degrees, doubted it. There wasn’t a thing alive that could withstand such high temperatures, but so much heat should have shown fire or something in the room. Yet there was nothing.

Disregarding the everyone else, she started a search for similar heat signatures and found only one: yesterday, in the Council room just after she and Fury had rushed out to their helicopter.

She put the tablet on the table so everyone could watch a dying Pierce, inhaling and opening his mouth for his last words only to choke on the inhalation and scream, eyes tracking and focusing on something close above his head, all before suddenly disappearing from the room.

“You were right, Tony,” Clint sighed, “That’s not good.”

\-----------------------------------

By the time Jane had reached the end of her lecture, she was laying face down on the bed with Darcy and Bucky, mumbling into the bedding. Sensing that the worst was over, Darcy released Bucky’s hand and crawled up to lay next to her friend.

“I’m sorry that I worried you,” Darcy said, curling on her side so that her face was next to Jane’s head, “I honestly thought that the safe word would be enough to make you not worry.”

Jane’s shoulders tensed, and she rolled over with her eyes blazing, but Darcy continued before Jane could start off again.

“I know now that was wrong! I should have known that it wouldn’t have been enough then, especially after the week we’ve had! I am so sorry, Janie-pants, so very sorry. I only did it because Bucky needed my help.”

“No!” Jane cried, throwing an accusing finger to where Bucky was still seated at the foot of the bed, “He’s an assassin! A dangerous assassin! He can fend for himself!”

“Um,” Darcy heard Bucky mumble from behind her, but Steve’s voice cut in.

“Hey! He’s a war hero! A prisoner of war for over seventy years!” Cap yelled.

Jane raised to her knees, but Darcy just rolled onto her back, debating dragging Jane out over her shoulder. She had a feeling this was going to get ugly.

Thor tried to placate Steve, “Yes, I’m sure Jane meant no offense. It’s been a long day.”

“Oh, I meant it!” Jane waddled forward on her knees, but after having to crane her head up to meet Steve’s eyes, got to her feet on the bed so she could tower over Captain America. She wobbled slightly, but Bucky caught her before she fell off.

Jane looked surprised, and begrudgingly thanked him before squaring off again with Steve.

“I get that he’s all tortured soul! I understand that this isn’t his fault, that he didn’t act of his own volition, but that doesn’t change the fact that he put my friend in danger! Doesn’t change the fact that he is dangerous!”

Steve bowed up, ready to retort, but Bucky chose that moment to pipe up.

“She’s not wrong.”

It was the first thing he’d said since the Smithsonian, and it obviously affected Steve. Darcy figured this was her cue.

“She’s not right, either. Not completely,” she said, sitting up, “Yeah, you’re dangerous, but honestly? So am I. And saying that you put me in danger is stripping me of my agency,” Jane spluttered at her, but Darcy continued undeterred, “Hush, I’ll break out my feminist theory if I have to, my friend. I made the choice to help Bucky as a grown and independent person. That’s on me, and I totally handled it. We’re both fine. I recognize the worry I made you feel, and I acknowledge that I could have handled it better, but I’d make the same decision every time. It was the right thing to do.”

Tony clapping from the door startled everyone, no one having noticed it opening in all the commotion. “Great speech, really, Independent Woman pt.3, roar, but we have a situation out here.”

\-----------------------------------

“This is so creepy, you have no idea,” Tony said as he held the tablet for everyone to see, but Bucky could hardly bring himself to watch. Pierce’s face brought up too many memories.

He was hanging back, standing behind Darcy where she sat on the loveseat with Jane, Thor next to them. The looks Darcy was getting weren’t slipping his notice. The red head wasn’t letting Darcy get between her and an exit, while the two men, the flying one and a new face, kept sending her nervous glances. Tony had given her a wide berth as they all crowded into the living room. Steve seemed determined to hover over Bucky, so he was in close proximity to Darcy by default.

These might be Steve’s friends, but Bucky didn’t trust them. 

Not with her.

While they all watched the footage, Bucky counted the weapons hidden on various people in the room, figuring out how to grab Darcy and get them out, just in case.

\-----------------------------------

As soon as Mephisto appeared on the screen, Darcy gasped. It was a blow straight to the stomach, bile rising within her.

“Darcy?” Jane asked, and she felt Bucky cup her shoulder from behind, but Darcy couldn’t tear her gaze from the screen.

“Mephisto,” she whimpered.

“Aye,” Thor agreed, a solid presence to her left on the arm wrest.

“What? What’s a Mephisto?” Clint asked, furrowing his brow.

“Him,” Darcy explained, tears in her voice, “The one talking to Pierce. That’s Mephisto.”

“Uh,” Tony said, turning the tablet around to check, “There is no one there. It’s just Pierce.”

“To mortals, to Midgardians, there is no one there. Mephisto can hide himself from the sight of mortals should he wish it, but that is him,” Thor explained. Jane put her arm around Darcy, dislodging Bucky’s hand in the process. Darcy couldn’t bring herself to do anything but collapse into Jane’s side, cheeks damp.

“Question,” the Black Widow interjected, “You said mortals can’t see, but Darcy could. Does that mean that Darcy is not human?”

“That’s none of your business,” Jane said, clutching Darcy protectively.

“No, Jane, it’s ok,” Darcy said, wiping under her eyes and lifting up.

“You need not reveal more than you wish, Shield-sister,” Thor said, glaring at his team mates like he was daring them to disagree.

“I know, big guy, but if I can’t trust Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, then who can I trust?” Darcy laughed sharply, “Although I don’t know you,” she pointed to the handsome man next to Clint, “I’m just assuming you’re a good guy because of the company you keep.”

“Sam Wilson,” said the new guy, amiable all things considered.

“Darcy Lewis,” she returned, then gave into her baser nature for theatrics, “Daughter of the devil, aka Mephisto. At your service.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. It's not Monday, yet???
> 
> Also, I feel like I should mention this: Steve's line at the end (you'll know which one) is from a couple posts that made the rounds on Tumblr back when Winter Soldier came out. If anyone else has better luck finding them, please tell me and I will link them.

“Sorry, what? Can you repeat that?” Tony stuck a finger in his ear and wriggled it around, pulling it out with a pop.

Sam was staring at the ceiling, then suspiciously narrowing his eyes at the floor, before settling on an accepting, “Huh,” and shrugging his shoulders.

The Black Widow didn’t appear to be moving at all.

Clint had to open his mouth a few times before sound came out. “But not like… the actual Devil, right?” he leaned forward and looked pleadingly at Darcy, “Like, the Devil-devil? That’s not…”

“You’re sitting in a room with the actual god of Thunder, Clint,” Darcy reminded him dryly. 

“Yeah,” Clint got up to pace, “But he’s an alien.”

“And I’m a demon,” she followed.

Jane came to her defense, “You’re only half demon. You’re half human, too.”

“How does that even work? Like, what, you’re mom got down and dirty with a guy who was literally horny?” Tony had joined Clint in pacing, but kept darting nervous glances her way.

Darcy didn’t have time to dignify that with a response before she felt it.

An ice prick at the back of her neck.

She stood up, cocking her head, letting the change come on, knowing that once she let her features shift, she’d be able to see more clearly.

As her eyes glossed over and her skin darkened, the Widow finally moved, reaching for something at the small of her back.

With a sigh, Darcy settled into her skin, letting her other senses wash over her.

It was a gun that the woman dripping with red was reaching for, an old one stinking of death. She was close to pulling it out, but that wasn’t the threat that had gotten her attention.

“Darcy?” she heard Jane ask, but ignored the question, focusing her mind like Betty had taught her so long ago.

There was someone in the apartment complex across the street, aiming a rifle straight at Bucky, finger already clenching on the trigger, poison lacing the bullet. Nasty stuff.

They were putting the Soldier down. Permanently.

Darcy looked back at him, met his eyes, and screamed.

\-----------------------------------

Bucky’s mind went blank, sure that Darcy had been telling him something with that look, but not knowing what.

He pulled a gun to parry the one that the redhead had pulled, relying on the ingrained skills to aim between her eyes on autopilot, much more concerned with whatever Darcy had seen to make her flee.

A heartbeat later, he felt the warmth of a body at his back, immediately accompanied by the sound of shattering of glass.

He caught her before she hit the floor, covering her body with his, but it was too late.

Jane was over the couch and at his side, hands covering and applying pressure to the weeping wound in Darcy’s shoulder while the rest of the room’s occupants took cover.

“Thor!” Jane ordered, not taking her eyes from Darcy, “Go, get him!”

She shoved Bucky, and thus Darcy whom he was still cradling, further underneath the window while Thor tore through it. Bucky’s world narrowed down to the woman in his arms, not noticing the crack of thunder from outside nor the blur of red and gold soaring through the broken window; not caring that Steve had rolled to them, huddling close and holding his shield over him and Darcy.

“Don’t worry, Bucktser,” she choked out, raising a hand but only managing to get it as high as his elbow, weakly grasping his arm, “It won’t kill me. I would know…”

Her words didn’t comfort him like she wanted because right after speaking them, she passed out cold.

\-----------------------------------

Thor hadn’t left much for them to interrogate. The Thunder God in a true fit of rage was a sight to behold, and he’d seemingly hit the end of his rope.

Tony had reached the scene, a room just a couple floors higher than their suite in the building across the street, soon after Thor had landed, but it didn’t matter.

“Blood is hell to get out of carpet, you know,” he said casually, watching Thor wipe Mjolnir on a nice Persian rug.

“I tire of dealing with this HYDRA. They meddle with forces beyond them,” Thor sighed.

Tony made a mental note to show him what he’d found out about Loki’s scepter later, when Thor wasn’t fresh from grinding bones to make his bread. He had JARVIS do a scan of the room and came up empty before Thor was standing, ready to fly.

“Come, we must get Darcy to a hospital posthaste,” Thor demanded, spinning his hammer to take flight.

“Yeah, doubt a doctor can do much for a hell-spawn,” Tony said, not missing the darkening of Thor’s face at the comment, “Lucky for us, Pepper and I just spent most of yesterday getting all of the SHIELD equipment with Stark tech back under our control.”

“I do not follow,” Thor muttered, still looking displeased.

“Means we have a quinjet. Means we have all the quinjets which we can use to fly Darcy to the Tower where I have a state of the art medical center and one Dr. Helen Cho. There’s no one better.”

Thor nodded, but raised the hammer ever so slightly, tilting it at Iron Man. “Alright, but know this: Should you or this Helen Cho act in any way inappropriately to Darcy Lewis, you will have offended not only Asgard as Darcy is a valued and beloved ally of my realm, but also the kingdom of Hell itself as she is it’s only and rightful heir.”

Tony blinked.

“Right,” he gulped, “No pressure.”

\-----------------------------------

In the end, Dr. Cho wasn’t much needed.

“I don’t understand it,” she fretted four days later over her sleeping patient, “Obviously, we are not dealing within human limitations,” she waved a hand over Darcy’s body which was still in its demonic form, “But even so, the toxin on the bullet would have been enough to fell Captain Rogers. Many times over, actually. Even without the toxin, the wound looks as though it’s had weeks to heal, not days.”

Bucky and Jane shared a look, used to the bewilderment of the doctor. The rest of the team, minus Sam and Natasha who had stayed in DC, had been holed up over HYDRA files. Bucky was happy to be rid of Steve, no matter how hangdog his face had been at leaving, and Jane was similarly glad to have Tony out of her sight.

It’d been just the two of them in the hospital room, a tentative truce having been reached at the understanding that they would work together to ensure Darcy was never alone. 

Jane didn’t trust these people with Darcy, either, that much was clear to Bucky. He wasn’t sure the diminutive scientist trusted anyone with her friend, but Darcy had needed expertise outside of Jane’s wheelhouse.

As it stood, the only thing keeping Bucky from sprinting out of the sterile environment of the lab was the thought of some of the things that had been done to him in places like these.

Like hell that was happening to Darcy.

“Well, you said it yourself, doc” Bucky drawled, stretching his neck to relieve the tension, “We’re not dealin’ with human rules here.”

And wasn’t that a trip. It’s not like he hadn’t realized that Darcy was special, but he’d thought it was more like what had happened with him, some scientist getting ideas in his head and forcing them on people, playing God.

Darcy being anything other than human had never even occurred to him. From the looks on everybody’s faces when Darcy had blurted it out like she had, no one else had expected it, either. He wondered if that was why she hadn’t wanted to tell him about her powers, if she was scared of what he’d think.

He hoped that wasn’t it because from where he was standing, he was still the monster between the two of them.

“What is that blood for?” Jane’s sharp question broke him out of his musing.

Dr. Cho pulled the needle out from Darcy’s arm and taped a piece of gauze to the spot. “I’m testing the concentration of the toxin in her blood, same as before,” she said, patiently.

“And then?” Jane asked, standing up and making her way to Darcy bedside. She stroked Darcy’s fingers, and, not for the first time, Bucky was struck with the affection that Jane let shine in her actions.

“And then I shall burn the sample, as always, and I’m sure you’ll watch me to make sure I destroy all of it, as always.”

Jane smiled.

“Damn straight,” she said, happily following Dr. Cho out of the room.

Bucky huffed out a laugh, making his way over to the bed as well.

“You’ve got quite the woman looking out for you, doll,” he said, trying to dispel the silence that once again hung in the room. He’d only known her for a short time, true, but it was long enough to know how unnatural silence was around Darcy.

He didn’t expect the reply that came.

“You should see her when someone eats the last donut,” came Darcy’s groggy voice, followed shortly by an owlish blinking of her eyes.

“Doll?” he asked, rushing to help her as she tried to sit up, “Hey, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“I think it’s a marvellous idea. God, you have no idea how good this feels,” she sighed, rolling her shoulders as soon as she was upright.

“I’ve been shot before, I know how not good it feels,” Bucky argued, worried.

“Not being shot, doofus, being in my body again,” she said, reaching for the water pitcher on her nightstand, wincing slightly when she put weight on her shoulder. Impressive considering she shouldn’t be able to move it at all right now. She drank her full, skin and eyes slowly returning to normal the longer she was awake, and then continued, “I’ve been stuck in MSS. Well, not stuck, but even though the whole demon body thing lets me heal fast, it turns out that it burns like a bitch. Easier to just remove myself from it.”

“You’ve been here, though.” He would know. He’d only left for the occasional shower and food run, even sleeping in the armchair in the corner while trying to drown out Jane’s snores from the matching chair most nights.

“Yeah, my body was here. It’s hard to explain,” she said, “I knew that I could be in MSS, like my mind or soul or whatever, and I could skip out on the painful bits. Admittedly, watching all of you guys sit around got pretty boring after a while, but I got a lot of thinking done.”

Bucky was having a hard time wrapping his mind around what all Darcy could and couldn’t do and figured the best plan was just to roll with it. He’d make her write a list or something later.

“Oh,” he sat next to her, “Was any of this thinking about how not to be stupidly heroic and nearly get yourself killed?”

Darcy rolled her eyes, but it only served to highlight the purple bruises underneath them, stark in contrast with her white face.

Even exhausted, with tangled hair and eyelashes glued together from days of sleep, she looked beautiful. Especially since the memory of her bleeding out in his arms was so fresh.

“I didn’t nearly get myself killed. I know death, Bucky, I know it, everything about it. It was never going to kill me. That bullet was going to kill you, though,” she said softly, leaning closer to him.

Careful not to jostle her wound, even if it was long sealed, he slid his arm around her shoulder. She let her upper body fall into him, melting into his embrace and forcing him to use both his hands to hold her up.

He tried to tell himself it was just her fatigue that had her snuggling into his side, but it was hard to believe when she hummed into his neck like that and wrapped her own arms around him.

Letting his face rest in her hair, the dirt and oil not bothering him a bit, he gave in, “Okay. Thank you for saving me,” he held her tighter, “What were you thinking about then?”

“You,” she laughed into him, her rib cage expanding quickly under his hand, “How to help you, I mean. Help you remember.”

“I’m remembering some on my own,” he said, feeling apprehensive but not knowing why.

“No,” she said, pulling back to gaze at his face, “You’re not. Not really. If you were, you’d be talking to Steve.”

He felt his face flush, shame bringing the color to the surface, and went to speak, but a single finger from Darcy on his lips kept him quiet.

“I’m not blaming you,” she said, watching her finger run from the center of his mouth and then along his bottom lip, his breath stuttering at the contact, “But I know you want to remember. I think I know a way to help with that.”

If she kept up with her finger, Bucky would probably agree to anything she proposed. Still, her suggestion surprised him.

“I think we should go to Asgard.”

\-----------------------------------

Darcy made a note that recently being shot made people a lot more compliant.

It wasn’t a tactic she really wanted to use again, but it had its merits.

She was pressing her case in front of the Avengers, with the exception of Natasha, while Jane stood at her wing. Darcy had sent Bucky off to sleep in a real bed, though she wasn’t sure how much rest he’d get. 

Thor thought it was a splendid idea, sure that the healers from his world could help ‘the Soldier of Winter’. Tony chimed in, nonchalantly informing them that HYDRA chatter indicated there was still a hit order out on Bucky, apparently having given up on bringing him back into the fold, and a capture order on her so going off world wasn’t the worst thing. Clint asked to come, but was promptly denied after his excited ramblings about space babes. Steve hadn’t said no which was as good as yes in her mind.

Jane had already declared she was going. Loudly.

There was a man in glasses and a purple shirt was shuffling around awkwardly behind the rest of them, so obviously uncomfortable that Darcy kept looking past her audience to him.

Squinting at him from behind her glasses, she was struck with a niggling sense of familiarity.

“Why do I know you?” she asked, never one to beat around the bush. Darcy moved closer to get a better look.

He checked around him for who she could be addressing, but, finding no one, mouthed ‘me’ questioningly at her.

“Duh,” she let the vowels drag out, wondering how one person could embody so much social flailing while being so still, “I know your face. Why do I know your face?”

“Uh,” he took off his glasses, intensely cleaning them on his wrinkled sleeve, “I taught at Culver for a bit?”

“Taught sciencey stuff?” she asked, observing his nod even though he was resolutely not looking up from his polishing, “Then no dice. I was super allergic to science class.”

“Then I’m not sure,” but he looked up, and, upon viewing his glasses-free face, knew immediately where she had seen him before:

On Betty’s desk, in a small frame off to the side, that Betty only talked about with a few drinks in her.

“You!” she shrieked, “You’re the jerk that ran out on Betty! Jane! I found the ass that left Betty!”

Jane perked up like a bloodhound on the scent.

“Dr. Banner? He’s the one?” she muttered, slinking over to join Darcy in staring him down.

“Um,” he gulped, taking a step back.

“Oh, party time,” they heard Tony whisper gleefully behind them.

No one noticed Steve make his exit, slipping out stealthily.

\-----------------------------------

Steve found Bucky in a guest suite, sitting on the couch with his eyes closed. As soon as he entered the room, Bucky was on his feet, knife in hand.

“Woah,” Steve calmed him, “It’s just me!”

Bucky didn’t look soothed, but at least he put his knife back in his boot. He stood there, arms limp at his side and looking anywhere but at Steve.

“I just wanted to talk to you, before you go to Asgard,” he began, but Bucky tensed up.

“You’re not going to keep me here,” he said, eyes flashing.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Buck,” Steve said softly, “I only wanted to tell you…” his mouth dried up, tongue weighed down with all the things he wanted to tell his best friend, but not knowing where to start. He swallowed, trying to get his thoughts in order. “I wanted to tell you that I’m going to shut HYDRA down. All of them, wiped out so no heads can grow back. Make up for not doing it right the first time,” he ended on a shrug, wanting to convey so much more, but hoping that there was enough of Buck in the man in front of him to recognize the promise in his words.

Bucky sighed, muscles of his neck relaxing.

“Last time, punk, you crashed yourself into the Arctic,” he said.

\-----------------------------------

Bucky wasn’t sure where the tease had come from, but it wasn’t lighthearted. It wasn’t meant to be hostile, either, which had to count for something.

“Hey, I said I didn’t do it right, didn’t I?” With a rueful smile, Steve sat down on the couch and let his hands hang between his open knees, bracing himself on his forearms, “For what it’s worth, if it’s worth anything, Buck, I’m sorry. For what’s happened to you… I can’t imagine…”

Bucky didn’t want to do this, realizing now that this was what he’d been avoiding all along. His head knew, even if he didn’t remember everything, that this wasn’t on Steve. He didn’t need to read all about Steve Rogers in that exhibit to know that, didn’t need his memories, just knew that Steve would have tried his hardest to save him if he’d known.

But his heart… His heart was heavy, covered in years of pain and horrors. It was that part of him that couldn’t look at Steve without wondering why he’d let this happen, even as his brain rationalized that it wasn’t Steve’s fault…

Bucky couldn’t help but look at Steve, and see that he got to stay a good man, where Bucky himself had been twisted, used up, and left stained black.

“I just,” Steve continued, unaware of Bucky’s internal crumbling, “I am so, so sorry.”

It wasn’t Steve’s fault. It wasn’t Steve’s fault.

“It wasn’t,” Bucky began, wanting to force the words out, but God, he couldn’t, not when it was so raw, not when he was still drowning in the void where his sense of self should be, “I can’t…” His arm started to hum, going through its settings, rhythmic vibrations echoing his distress.

“Buck,” Steve interrupted, eyes kind and so _good_ , “It’s okay. I just had to tell you that. I’d be with you every step of the way if I thought it would help. Hell, I want to be there anyway, even after watching you cringe every time I so much as look at you, but I can’t be that selfish. I won’t make this about me, and it’s clear that I’m not the one who can help you. So I’ll do what I can: wipe HYDRA out, one by one. They won’t get you, they won’t be able to get anyone, ever again. I promise you that HYDRA ends with me.”

The arm was quiet again, but Bucky had to blink the moisture out of his eyes, refusing to acknowledge it.

“Ok,” he huffed, “I believe you.” Ducking his head, he laughed a bit before saying, “You know, Steve, I don’t remember a lot, but I do remember you gettin’ into your fair share of scrapes.”

“Yeah?” Steve answered, blinking as furiously as Bucky was. He was man enough, however, to actually wipe away the stray tears instead of pretending they weren’t there.

“For what it’s worth,” Bucky mirrored Steve’s earlier words, “I am sorry that I won’t be the one backing you up this time,” meaning every word despite any misplaced resentment he was sorting through in his own head.

“Don’t be,” Steve said before looking down and admitting in a soft, defeated voice, “After all, I owe you. When I was the one that fell, you jumped. I didn’t.”

Bucky didn’t know how to respond to that, no where near well enough to process that concept, but it chipped away at the distance he was trying to put between them, subconsciously or not.

Pulling Steve in for a long overdue hug, Bucky allowed himself to hold on as tightly as he wanted.

Steve wouldn’t break.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (1) I am not an astrophysicist or physicist or scientist of any kind. I look at pictures of the cosmos, and the only thing floating through my head is “Oooh, pretty”. Also sometimes thoughts about aliens, but that’s irrelevant.
> 
> Point is, I have no true understanding of space travel, real or theoretical, so I’m going to need everyone to just roll with my interpretation of Darcy’s powers, please and thank you.
> 
> (2) FAN ART WAS DRAWN. [ HERE IT IS ](http://iamkatebishop.tumblr.com/post/127396448607/guys-it-happened-bansheedarcy-art-im-crying)

“Shouldn’t we be outside for this?” Jane asked from her perch on the couch in the common area, watching as Darcy directed Thor and Bucky with their luggage.

“So that we can go viral on grainy cell phone footage? No, thank you,” Darcy huffed as she double checked that they had all of their bags. As pretty as those Asgardian dresses had been, Darcy wasn’t signing up for a corset again. Tony and Bruce were on the observatory deck above, Tony having wanted to watch and Bruce wary of getting close to Jane and Darcy again after narrowly avoiding a Hulk out the last time. Steve was up there, too, and Darcy had caught Bucky giving him a terse nod.

“That’s fine with me,” Jane yawned and stretched to lean back on her arms, “As long as Tony’s cool with a Bifrost mark forever burned into the floor and a hole ripped in his ceiling.”

Darcy ignored Tony’s squawk, grabbing Bucky and placing him where she wanted him around the huddled bags.

“We’re not going through the Rainbow-tube, boss!” she said, excitedly dragging Thor to stand next to Bucky and then making her way over to get Jane, “I’m taking us myself!”

Jane pushed up off the couch and skirted around the coffee table, outside of Darcy’s reach. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Come on,” Darcy smiled beguilingly, but Jane was not having it, keeping the table between them as they circled, “I did it before, and that place was way farther than Asgard!”

“No!” Jane plucked a couch cushion and waved it threateningly, “That was just you and me! This is four people and luggage!”

“How will I ever get better if I don’t practice, Janie?” Darcy cried.

Tony was chanting “Pillow fight!” up until Steve elbowed him hard in the ribs. Then it was a lot of gasping and leaning over the railings.

“How about you practice on Thor? He won’t break as easily as me!” Jane swatted Darcy as she moved close.

Darcy wasn’t terribly concerned because she had a trump card.

“If we go my way, you can actually see everything in space. No bright lights obscuring your view.”

Jane stopped trying to smack her, narrowed her eyes, and muttered, “You win.”

\-----------------------------------

“I did not wish to bring this up while still on Midgard, for I feared it would cause the Captain more stress, but have we considered that my father might not be inclined to help Bucky?” Thor said as Jane nearly threw out her neck trying to take everything in on the journey.

As a comet flew by, she squealed so loudly that even Bucky winced. They were all in a circle, arms linked and at least one hand on each bag, hurtling through space at incredible speed. After making sure that everyone knew they had to be touching each other at all times for this to work, Darcy had been unsuccessfully trying to get them to sing campfire songs since they’d left New York.

It was fun, actually, letting loose with her power. The ends of the Universe were her limits, and that was a heady thought.

“Is there gonna be a problem with that, you think?” Bucky asked, furrowing his brow, “I don’t want to get Darcy in trouble.”

“Chill, Buck, I’ve got it covered.” Darcy wasn’t worried. She took a deep draw of the icy air, letting it fill her lungs.

God, it was nice.

“Darcy, the All-Father holds you in great esteem, do not mistake me. He has offered you sanctuary which is a rare thing, but that does not mean he will extend it to anyone,” Thor warned, using a leg to pull Jane back from where she was leaning, bending backwards trying to get a better view of a shiny rock as they zoomed by.

“Look, if it’s a problem, I’ve already got a way to work around it. I think you guys are really underestimating how bored I got in MSS. I thought of everything, promise.”

Bucky smiled at her, a small indulgent expression that he’d been shooting at her more and more since she woke up. “Care to share with the class, doll?”

“Yeah,” she licked her lips, enjoying the way his smile twitched at the motion, “You guys should probably be in on it. Don’t want you guys to blow our cover if it comes to that. Jane!” she barked at her friend, making sure she’d gotten her attention before continuing, “If Odin makes a fuss, I’ll just tell him Bucky’s my consort. No biggie.”

Jane’s nostrils flared.

Bucky actually blushed all the way down his neck.

Thor nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, that should do it. Clever plan, Darcy,” he said.

Jane’s nostrils flared some more.

\-----------------------------------

“So,” came Tony’s voice, suddenly right over his shoulder, startling Bruce still, “I’ve been thinking.”

Bruce inhaled deep, letting the motion center him. He wasn’t close to a Code Green, but he was more on edge since nearly being overcome by the Other Guy yesterday. Even with being incident free since the Battle of New York despite living with Tony Stark and his madness, it had only taken fifteen minutes with Darcy and Jane for all of his hard won control to be for naught.

What were the chances that people who knew Betty, hell that friends of Betty, found their way to the Avengers’ inner sanctum?

With Bruce’s luck, apparently pretty good.

“You’re always thinking, Tony,” Bruce sighed, finishing a sentence in his notes with a flourish before looking up at his friend.

“Point, but this is about something new; something to address some concerns I have after learning that, oh, you know, along with Norse gods and aliens, the devil is apparently real, too. Don’t you think that revelation is worth a little consideration?” Tony propped his hip against Bruce’s desk, arms crossed. The posture caused him to look down on Bruce from where he was seated, a position Bruce doubted was accidental.

“No,” Bruce said and turned back to his notes.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say!” Tony spun his chair around so they were again face to face.

“I don’t need to,” Bruce said, trying to rotate his chair back but struggling against the grip Tony had on the back of it, “I know that face. Pepper warned me about that face! She made me promise I would say no to that face, no matter what.”

“What? Since when do you and Pepper talk?” Tony didn’t look like he was straining at all while Bruce’s shoes slipped on the smooth glass floor, not getting enough traction to force his chair back towards the desk.

“I live here, Tony. Obviously, Pepper and I talk,” Bruce gave up and flopped bonelessly back into his seat, “We have tea every Sunday morning, after yoga.”

Tony frowned, eyes drooping. “Why am I not invited?”

Bruce closed his eyes, hoping that if he didn’t see Tony, then Tony would go away.

“You’re always asleep on Sunday morning, do you really want us to wake you up for oolong? You don’t even like tea; you called it dirty leaf juice the last time I offered you some.”

“I could have still been invited. I mean, you guys were just being rude. Regular Mean Girls,” Tony finally released his chair and straightened up, “But no worries. I know how you can make it up to me. I have this great idea, even have a super cool name and everything!”

Pepper forgive him, he was too tired to argue with Tony. “Super cool name, huh? What is it?”

Tony clapped his hands triumphantly, and exclaimed, “U.L.T.R.O.N.”

\-----------------------------------

While he could not say that he had ever pondered what mate that the heir to Hell would take, Odin could say with every certainty that he would not have picked a Midgardian.

Then again, he never would have assumed the heir herself to be of Midgard, so perhaps he should not be in the business of making bets.

“Your consort?” he asked, levelling his eye on the man in question and being pleasantly surprised that his look was met head on, “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

The headstrong princess smiled and cooed, “Yuppers!” wrapping an arm around her chosen one’s waist and laying a particularly vulgar and smacking kiss to his cheek, leaving a smudge of red on the skin there. Soon, the paint from her lips blended into the blush crossing the man’s face.

Whoever this James Buchanan Barnes was, it seemed that even he was not immune to Princess Darcy’s spontaneity. Noting the scowl that his own son’s lover wore, Odin moved to greet Thor and Jane.

Jane did not spare him a look even as he kissed her hand, not tearing her eyes from Sir Barnes.

Oddly, Odin found it endearing, heartening, that Jane was as fierce in her protective nature as Thor was in battle. After the events with the Dark Elves, he’d been forced to confront the reality that Thor was no longer just his heir; just his son that needed constant lessons. Thor had grown and matured into a man that Odin…

A man that Odin was proud to call his son, yes, but also a man to whom Odin must now recognize had wisdom of his own.

Wisdom that knew the right partner.

“Tis lovely to see you, Dr. Jane Foster of Midgard, healthy and well,” Odin said, pointedly ignoring the delighted smile blooming on his son’s face.

Jane whipped her head back to stare up at him, glancing down to where he held her hand like she had only just noticed.

“Um,” she said, pumping his hand fervently up and down, perhaps in some Midgardian custom? “Thank you. For saying that. And for having us. Yes.”

“Yeah, we really appreciate it,” Princess Darcy cut in, still huddled close to her consort, his metal hand clutching loosely at her hip, “You know how Midgard is with technology. Such a drag. Asgardian tech is the way to go.”

“Our technology you compliment,” Odin gestured to their parcels they had brought with them, “But not our garments, then?”

The rest of her party paled, but not the princess.

Just like he knew she wouldn’t.

“All-Father, if you had to carry two boulders around on your chest, you’d hate Asgardian clothes, too, my man.”

Odin threw his head back and laughed.

“I had not thought of that,” he said, wiping under his eye, “In that case, let us get your things to your rooms post-haste. Come, you must be weary. You all will rest tonight, and tomorrow, you may consult the healers about your consort’s mind.”

With that, he motioned to the guards to carry the bags and swept out of the throne room. Just as he passed through the doorway, he heard the Princess whispering, “Ow, stop it, Jane! I think that went really well! Stop!”, followed by Thor’s chuckling.

It was good to hear at least one of his sons’ happiness in his home again.

\-----------------------------------

“Did you know,” Darcy drawled from where she was spread out on the bed. The bed. Singular. “That apparently a perk of being a demon princess is a shit ton of furs? I shudder to think what kind of alien beastie produces a ten foot long hide, but I really hope that I never find out.”

Bucky was frozen next to the fire pit, metal arm gleaming orange.

“Thor talks about bilgesnipes a lot, but I think those are lizards with antlers. Hey, do you think you’d win against a giant lizard with antlers, Buckaroo?”

He hadn’t really thought through this whole pretending to be together thing. When she’d mentioned it, she’d been smiling so wide that her blackened eyes crinkled in the corners, basking in the starlight and skin giving off a slight red glow from the patterns dancing over her skin.

Bucky hadn’t really put thought into much else besides watching her enjoy letting her powers flow.

Now, facing the one bed and with his cheek still waxy from her lipstick, he was beginning to see some flaws in their plan.

“Bucky? Hey, where’d you go?” Darcy was asking him, sitting up from concern.

“There’s only one bed,” he choked out, wondering if he’d blushed this much back when he’d just been Bucky and not the Winter Soldier.

Darcy looked down, smoothing her hands over the furs she’d been rolling around on like a cat.

“Yes,” she responded, clearly not getting what he was caught up on.

“There’s only one bed and two of us,” he clarified, hating how lost he sounded.

Hearing his uncertainty, Darcy perked up even more. She shimmied to the edge so she could hop off and joined him where he was standing. She raised a hand to grasp one of his, pulling it up between them. He focused on that, on how small her fingers felt in his, how soft.

“It’s a big bed, and we have to keep up appearances,” she stroked over and between his knuckles, lulling his heart rate back to a more reasonable range as she continued, “We’ve slept together before.”

“Doll, if we’d slept together, you’d remember it,” came out of his mouth before he’d even registered what she said, some forgotten instinct coming to the forefront. His heart went into double time again, panic flooding his system.

She giggled, but her eyes were sad as she looked up at him from half lidded eyes. She quirked her mouth at him, then brought his hand up to lay a kiss on it.

“We’re nowhere near that, soldier, and we both know it. You don’t know who you are. Not yet.”

Bucky used his free hand to pull her in closer, terrified of the truth she was preaching but still wanting the comfort he found when she was in his arms. She kept their clasped hands between them, sighing as his forehead came to rest on hers.

“It’s why I’m not worried about it being only one bed, not right now. We’re not there yet, but we…” she inhaled deep, “There’s something there. It’s why I helped you…”

“Trust,” he whispered, rocking them slightly, in a pale echo of a dance, feet feeling the pull to move, but not knowing where.

Darcy followed him where he moved, small swaying motions, nothing to really change them.

“Yeah, trust. And something else. Something about you, even back in New Mexico. I took off your mask,” she pulled their heads apart so there was a modicum of space between them, “I saw your eyes, and… There was something about them. Something of the… man underneath. Something in me…”

“Recognized something in me,” Bucky finished.

She smiled, nodding, before burrowing back into him.

They stood there holding each other, slowly whirling in the firelight.

\-----------------------------------

Thor slipped out from bed, careful not to wake Jane from where she was snoring underneath the covers.

Throwing on a shirt from his armoire, he let a small smile grace his face as he gazed upon the lump that was his beloved. He dropped a kiss to her brow, watching as her nose twitched in annoyance and letting the love he felt for her wash over him, warm him, before he faced this night’s task.

The smile stayed on his face through all of the hallways, only fading when faced with the door holding his quest.

Taking a fortifying breath, he pushed through the door.

Unsurprised to find his father already sitting vigil at his mother’s sick bed, Thor was quiet in his approach. Taking the seat next to the All-Father, he clasped a steady hand on Odin’s hunched shoulder before addressing the comatose woman before him.

“Hello, mother.”


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, hello again! This chapter is the longest by a fair bit to make up for the delay. It also could use a couple more sweeps of editing, but I just wanted to get it out there. I'll edit it some more tomorrow, but if you see anything glaring, please let me know!

Darcy watched Bucky still himself through deep breaths as the soul forge, or quantum field generator as Jane had chirped happily, did its thing over him. The healers made tutting noises every now and again as they rushed around his prone form, always careful to leave a respectable bubble of space around Darcy where she sat, but Eir, the head healer, was kindly explaining the mechanics of what she was doing to Jane.

She didn’t understand half of what they were saying, but her friend seemed happy, absorbing every word Eir spoke. Darcy sighed as Bucky flinched when a healer gently probed his temple with an odd stick looking tool.

“Hey,” Darcy soothed, propping her chin on his chest so she could fill his field of vision, “Focus on me. We’re okay.”

Bucky latched his eyes on hers but didn’t lose the taut lines around his mouth.

They’d woken this morning in peaceful warmth under all of those strange alien furs, Bucky curled in around the arm she had reached across his middle, and with her huddled so close to his back that his every inhale lifted her.

Fully clothed, never even having kissed, and yet intimately comforted by each other’s presence.

It was maybe that comfort that drew the confession of worry out of Bucky. Worry that whatever unknown was going to be done to him today would be something like the horrors that had been inflicted on him in the past. His remembrances of it were fragmented, but, in the soft morning light and wrapped up in each other, he haltingly told her of the hard leather of the chair, of the taste of split rubber in his mouth, of choking on screams while cloying voices whispered lies straight into his mind.

Darcy held him through it, happy that her face was tucked between his shoulder blades so that he couldn’t see her grim frown or her wide eyes.

She’d responded the only way she could.

She promised him she wouldn’t let that happen again.

So in this medical room, as he stared into her eyes while Eir’s hands worked the light particles above them, Darcy shifted a hand to lay over his heart, never looking away.

Bucky gave her a shaky smile and the chest under her sunk with his gentle sigh.

\--------------------------------------

“Given what I’ve seen of the Princess’ beloved and what he can do, I would have thought that you would wish to be with Princess Darcy and Lady Jane,” Heimdall said as Thor entered the observatory.

“The day that Darcy and Jane combined cannot handle themselves is the day that Fandral marries, that Volstagg is satisfied with one boar, and that your sister decides to lay down her sword,” Thor laughed, coming to stand next to his old friend

“I recall an incident involving the two of them attempting to steal a fearsome, scaled creature from the,” Heimdall paused as he tried to recall the Midgardian term, “The Zoo! Yes, they thought the beast would make a good companion while they worked, did they not?”

“Aye, that they did,” Thor shuddered at the memory of the apologies he’d had to make. It was the only Pub Crawl he had missed, having had an Avengers related emergency, and he had made sure to never again miss another. Why an inebriated Jane had wanted a Komodo dragon was beyond him, but he was simply thankful that he had caught Darcy before she’d made it into the enclosure. “But James poses no threat to Darcy or Jane. That need not be a worry.”

Heimdall allowed that, nodding thoughtfully before turning to look over the cosmos again.

“Very well, my prince. Tis good that you came to me, for I have a matter of great urgency to discuss with you,” Heimdall spoke with all the gravity the Guardian possessed.

Thor turned to face the vastness of the stars, looking for whatever was causing his friend’s grave tone, despite knowing that his eyes could never match the other’s sight.

“As Guardian of Asgard, I watch the actions of millions of souls, watch the choices they make, watch the ripples of those choices spread far and wide, sometimes even beyond worlds… With so much to be seen, it is not always clear which souls and which choices and which ripples will be of what importance, which will affect the way a leaf blows and which will decide the life or death of someone…”

Thor waited for Heimdall to elaborate, but he seemed lost in thought as he gazed out into space.

“And these ripples trouble you?” Thor prompted.

Heimdall sighed.

“Yes, they must trouble me for they began with Asgard’s failure.”

“Asgard, for all its glory and all its triumphs, has had its fair share of failures like any other world,” Thor said neutrally, accepting with grace that which had been proven to him so painfully over the years.

“Aye,” Heimdall agreed, “But this failure, so minute in the moment, shall prove to be the downfall of so much, the death of so many, if not corrected soon.”

“Then we shall correct it. Of which failure do you speak?”

“After the battle with the Chitauri, we only demanded Loki and the Tesseract be returned to Asgard. Because we were blinded by the imminent danger that those two presented, we did not realize the danger we had left behind. That perhaps could be forgiven, but I fear it has already caused irreparable effects in the scheme of Yggdrasil,” Heimdall spoke, closing his eyes and cutting of his great gaze, not wanting to see anymore.

Thor, though puzzled at Heimdall’s meaning at first, put together the pieces quickly.

“Loki’s scepter,” he growled.

\--------------------------------------

Of all the situations where Darcy imagined getting her hands all over James Buchanan Barnes, none of them had ever involved her best friend being there.

Never in all of her wildest fantasies had she been groping Bucky’s chest because she and Jane were practically carrying him back to their room. Bucky’d been great all through the trying day, but even a super soldier apparently could only handle so much emotional stress. Light was still pouring through the arched windows of the hall, a fact Darcy was thankful for because dragging Bucky along in the dark sounded like a recipe for disaster.

“Why is it,” Jane huffed from the other side of gigantic dude, looking impossible tiny under the metal arm, “that we are the ones doing the heavy lifting when we’re on a planet of aliens with super-strength?”

Bucky was awake enough to chuckle a bit and tried to take some of his weight back from Jane. Unfortunately, he overshot and ended up pitching too much onto Darcy.

Halting to get her footing, Darcy grunted, “Because it’d be kind of shitty to force manhandling strangers on Bucky after everything.”

“Right, right,” Jane panted, pushing them forward again.

“I could…” Bucky started voice hoarse, “I can make it.”

His statement was belied by him tripping over air.

Again.

“Yeah, Tin Man, keep telling yourself that,” Darcy laughed, shooting Bucky a smirk.

Bucky rolled his eyes but didn’t protest as they finally reached his and Darcy’s room. They had to awkwardly crab walk in sideways to get through the door while staying upright. With a final ungraceful shove, the two women got him on the bed only to collapse themselves on either side of him.

“First thing when we get back, boss, we’re upping our fitness regimen,” Darcy choked out, trying in vain to catch her breath.

Jane’s head popped up like a weasel to peer shrewdly over Bucky’s broad chest. “We don’t have a fitness regimen.”

“That seems irresponsible of us given how much time we spend running head first into danger,” Darcy propped herself on her bent arm, turning into Bucky to face her friend.

“And we’re alive! See, no fitness regimen needed!” Jane stated smugly.

“Which could also be attributed to dumb luck as far as I’m concerned,” Darcy continued, absentmindedly running her hand up and down the inside of Bucky’s forearm.

“Dumb luck!” Jane spluttered, “Dumb luck is not a quantifiable variable, and you know that!”

Darcy’s quiet laughter was accompanied a small smile of Bucky’s, creating a satisfied warmth deep in her chest. “You’re too easy, Janie-pants.”

They were interrupted by a voice at the door.

“Aye, my love, your fury is becoming a might predictable,” interjected Thor from where he was leaning against the frame. Darcy noticed the clenched fists where his arms were folded.

Her focus, however, was taken by Bucky sitting up. She put a hand at his back to help, but she needn’t have worried. Bucky was the one to pull her up straight as he greeted Thor.

“I think that’s my cue,” Jane hopped down, ambling towards the Thunder God, “See you guys tomorrow.”

Darcy furrowed her brow at Bucky’s jaunty wave, suspicion welling.

“You could have gotten to the room on your own just fine, couldn’t you have?” she accused.

Bucky crooked an eyebrow and leaned back on his elbows, looking up at her from under his lashes and presenting an altogether too enticing picture.

Darcy was not easily distracted. On the contrary, this confirmed her suspicions.

“You turd! Do you have any idea how heavy you are?” she jabbed him low in the belly.

“Hey!” he laughed, skittering away from her across the furs, “Okay! I _was_ worn out! I could have pushed through it, though, sure, but can you blame a guy for not turning down the help of his best girl when he’s in a weakened state?” He accompanied the last line with a wink that was a shade too exaggerated to be normal. Darcy recognized avoidance when she saw it. While he may have been able to physically trudge on no matter the circumstance, today… hell, the last week had been emotionally exhausting for Bucky.

If he wanted to avoid that for a while with some harmless flirting, who was she to deny him?

“Best girl, huh?” Darcy drawled, artfully draping herself at the head of the bed, fanning her hair out and letting the neck of her shirt be tugged slightly down with the motion. Bucky’s swallow as only an inch or so was revealed brought a thrill to her.

“Course, doll. What else would you be but my best girl?” Bucky crawled up to her, eyes locked on that inch of skin beneath her collar bone. For her part, Darcy’s whole thought process had narrowed to the play of muscles in his arm as moved to hover over where she lay.

She glanced up, startled to find his face right over hers. The shock thankfully brought back her senses. With a trembling sigh that displaced the curtain of Bucky’s hair that had fallen to frame them, she raised a hand to his chest. “Dangerous game we’re playing here, Soldier.”

His heart stuttered at her voice, it’s rapid beat a heavy thrum against her fingers. Bucky closed his eyes before sighing, “You have no idea,” and rolling off her.

They lay there, barely separated, trying to let the embers die. Time passed, and gradually, the air in the room receded to the usual comfortable familiarity they felt with each other instead of the heat of before.

Darcy’s hand found his in the darkening room, another of Asgard’s magnificent sunsets happening out over their balcony.

“Bucky?” she asked as his thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. A squeeze was her only answer. “Even though we’re totally not there yet, when we do get there? You know, eventually after healing and a long, fulfilling journey of self-realizations, triumphs, and a lot of hard work?”

She could feel Bucky shift to peek at her and smiled.

“Buckaroo, when we do get _there_ , we are going to be so fucking good together.”

He groaned a laugh before dragging her onto his chest and into his arms, shushing her giggles as he settled them in for the night.

\--------------------------------------

Jane once again thanked Darcy’s foresight as she watched Thor unbuckle the millionth buckle on his armor. She’d been lounging in her Batman nightshirt for ten minutes, laughing at her partner as he cursed yet another layer of clothing for taking so long to remove.

Thor finally lost the last of his clothes and vaulted into bed, dragging her to his side from where she had been comfortably curled. He playfully sneered at pajamas, the beginning of a long running argument they both enjoyed having.

“Not all of us have the body heat of a polar bear and can just sleep in nothing like you,” Jane responded to his sneer with a mischievous glint.

“A polar bear, you say? I have yet to meet this fearsome beast, but if it shares my views on proper slumbering attire, I believe I shall like the bears of the pole,” Thor grumbled into the hollow of her neck.

Jane ran her fingers through his hair, undoing his braids as he rolled to rest his head on her chest, arms securely wrapped around her.

“Want to tell me what had you so tense earlier?” Jane asked, letting him take the time to formulate his answer as she continued with his hair, giving his scalp a scratch with each pass of her hand.

“Aye, if you keep with your ministrations,” Thor sighed, pressing his face even more into her.

“Of course,” she answered with a kiss to his crown.

“I spoke with Heimdall. I intended only to thank him for his assistance when you were captured, but I instead learned of a great threat…”

They fell asleep like that, Thor holding her and her soothing him as they talked through the dangers posed against their worlds.

\--------------------------------------

While the two couples slept, tangled in each other in both bodies and dreams, Odin again sat vigil, unyielding and, ultimately, unable to help.

\--------------------------------------

For Bucky, waking was not a process or an evolution.

It’s instantaneous, as is his awareness, even without opening his eyes.

He’s aware of the delicate weight of Darcy curled half on top of him, just as he’d positioned her last night; aware of the first rays of sunlight encroaching across the marble floors; aware of the chill in the room because of the long dead fire; but most of all, he’s aware of the person seated at the foot of their bed.

Before he’s decided whether to use the knife under his pillow or to go with the basics and use his arm, the seated figure startled Darcy upright.

“Well, isn’t this cozy?” Jane drawled, seemingly relaxed, but Bucky takes note of how her focus is entirely on his arm that’s still wrapped around Darcy’s waist.

“Christ on a cracker, Jane!” Darcy heaved, eyes wide and the beginnings of black at their rims.

Jane noticed this, but plowed ahead regardless. “Any particular reason you love birds seem eager to sleep the day away?” she questioned sweetly, deftly avoiding the pillow Darcy chucks at her.

“I hate you so much right now,” Darcy seethed, black overriding the blue of her irises, skin taking on that distinctive red hue.

Bucky was not surprised that Jane was unphased.

“Gee, I seem to recall many a morning where you decided to do the same thing to Thor and me… What was the excuse last time? Oh yeah, you needed Mjolnir to kill a spider.”

“Excuse me, that was more traumatic for me than you! Because when I said I needed Thor’s hammer, _I did not mean that one_! And that spider was as big as my face!” Darcy leapt out of the bed, but Jane stood her ground.

“Turnabout is fair play, my friend,” she cackled, “Now up and at ‘em! Thor wants us all to have breakfast together. Get dressed!”

With that, she strutted out of the room, leaving Darcy in all of her demonic glory and Bucky with a pretty spectacular view to start his day with, if he did say so himself.

\--------------------------------------

Odin was in the middle of re-reading yet another medical tome to no effect when he heard his son’s footsteps. Sighing, he closed the book, yet again frustrated by his fruitless searches. Why he thought his eyes would catch something that the healers had missed, he knew not.

Perhaps it was just the arrogance of an old fool.

“Father,” Thor called quietly, and Odin was relieved that, even amidst everything, the face of his son could still bring an easy smile out of an old king.

He lead them out of the Archives before speaking, “The guards informed me that you were breaking fast with our guests this morning.”

Thor’s visage lightened, as it always did with even the smallest mention of his beloved. “Yes, I shall join them after talking with you. First, I am afraid I must report to you as my king.”

They had reached the throne room, but Odin for once did not feel like standing on ceremony and so motioned to the balcony rather than taking his rightful seat.

“What is it that calls for me to be a king so early in the day?” Odin asked, hiding his weariness by keeping his gaze on his city.

“Heimdall has discovered that…” Thor hesitated, “that a mistake of Asgard’s has become a growing threat to… well, to everyone.”

Odin could feel a headache brewing.

“And this mistake of Asgard’s? Don’t tell me that I must guess?”

Thor chuckled without mirth before looking down. “Leaving Loki’s scepter on Midgard.”

“Ah,” Odin nodded thoughtfully, “I thought that might be a problem.”

“What?” Thor thundered, startled, “You realized it could be dangerous and still did nothing to retrieve it?”

“If this is the approach you have with your king, I hate to imagine the tone you would have for your father,” Odin commented drily, “I obviously did not realize at the time, but recent developments have shown me the potential errors of my decisions.”

“What recent developments, my king?” Thor questioned, duly chastened.

“Your brother’s treachery has ever expanding consequences. In light of that, I have been forced into conference with a most unusual suspect,” Odin wished fiercely, for the millionth time today alone, for Frigga as she was so much better with words, “Loki has joined forces with Thanos, the Mad Titan. We do not know exactly what they have planned, but given their combined insanity and thirst for power, it can only end in devastation.” 

Absorbing all of this, Thor still asked the one question that Odin least wished to answer. “Who is this most unusual suspect?”

“My son, when you are king, there will be a great many things you will do that you never could have imagined yourself doing before. For me, the greatest of those,” Odin braced himself, “has been working with King Mephisto.”

A chunk of stone broke off the railing under Thor’s hands at his shock.

“Darcy’s father?” At Odin’s reluctant nod, Thor purposefully ripped more stone from the rail like a child throwing a tantrum, “You’ve been in contact with that demon? The one who has caused Darcy immeasurable pain and suffering? The one who tore the soul itself from her mother’s body?”

“Honestly, if you think that is the worst of his crimes, you are horrifically biased,” Odin calmly pointed out.

“Father!” Thor whispered, aghast.

Odin shrugged, not moved.

“Mephisto is the king of Hell. He is evil. However, he is also a father and, as such, has a vested interest in capturing Loki.”

Thor was clearly not comprehending.

“Loki assaulted his daughter, did he not?” Odin sighed, “But that is neither here nor there. We have a common enemy. Thanos’ gauntlet has none of the Infinity Stones so we can be sure that he means to collect them. It’s likely the scepter houses one if Heimdall is seeing catastrophe in its wake. Go to Midgard, assemble your warriors, and retrieve the scepter.”

“I agree the scepter needs to be found, but surely, the Avengers can handle the task without me,” Thor began but Odin swiftly interrupted.

“The destruction that will follow if Thanos finds even just one of the Stones brooks no gamble. You will go, and that is an order from your sovereign king.”

Thor pushed a harsh breath through his nose before giving a curt bow.

“What of Princess Darcy and Lady Jane?” he gruffly asked.

“They will remain here on Asgard. The royal consort will receive medical aid, and the entire party will be safest here.”

“They will be the ones to decide whether or not they will stay,” Thor said, steel in his voice before adding more gently, “Father.”

Odin nodded gamely, watching his son sweep from the balcony. Turning, he rested his forearms on the ruined rail. Yggdrasil had been whispering. He had never been gifted at interpreting the whispering like Frigga, but Odin would have to have been deaf to miss the warnings.

Midgard was the key, the key to everything.

\--------------------------------------

Breakfast was already underway by the time Thor made it to the small veranda.

“Sorry, big guy,” Darcy apologized, “But the food smelled and looked too good. Some of us,” she elbowed Jane, “were too weak to wait.”

Jane, for her part, stuffed some more sausage in her mouth and smiled with no remorse. Thor took the empty seat next to her and stole the rest of her sausage as recompense.

“Bucky!” Thor boomed as the soldier in question took a huge bit of some pudding-like substance that he’d been mainlining, “I see you are enjoying the a-smff,” Thor was abruptly cut off by Jane’s hand slapping over his mouth.

“What’s the rule?” Jane asked, slowly removing her hand but keeping it raised in case she needed to use it again. Darcy kept eating, but Bucky eyed the exchange with interest.

Thor answered sheepishly, “I am never allowed to tell you of what Asgardian food is made.”

Darcy nodded and muttered “Damn straight” under her breath, knowing full well that Thor could hear her. The hang dog look he shot her did nothing to her resolve.

“How’d the meeting with Odin go?” Jane asked, changing the subject.

“What meeting with Odin?” Darcy herself asked before Thor could answer.

Bucky continued to watch everyone with the same interest.

“I went to Heimdall yesterday,” Thor began, speaking while heaping mounds of food onto his plate, “and was warned of terrible threat to not only Asgard, but to all of the nine realms. Should this evil be allowed to flourish, should this threat be realized, only blood and suffering will follow, havoc would reign. To insure this does not come to pass, the All-Father has ordered me to Midgard so that I might find the threat before it falls into the hand of those who would use it for malevolence.”

Bucky swallowed the truly disgusting amount of food he’d been chewing before leaning to whisper in Darcy’s ear, “Is he always so… poetical?”, blissfully unaware of Asgardians’ enhanced senses.

Or blissful until Thor began to laugh heartily, lifting the tense atmosphere a smidge.

“Darcy asked almost the exact same question early in our acquaintance,” he chuckled, looking at Darcy fondly, “I believe you two are well matched.”

She noticed Jane’s eyes narrowing at Thor for his pronouncement, but Darcy figured she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

“So you’re leaving?” Darcy redirected them to the matter at hand.

“I must,” Thor nodded, “but the All-Father wishes for you three to stay on Asgard for your protection and for the continued treatment of you, Bucky. I informed him that the decision would be made by all of you yourselves.”

Darcy knew that Bucky had to stay because Asgard was his best shot at help and the one place HYDRA couldn’t reach him. She also knew that she needed to be with him for this, knew it without needing to examine the reasoning too closely. But suddenly, the thought that Jane would probably want to go home struck her. Dr. Jane Foster had never missed an opportunity to in the middle of the action, and Darcy Lewis had always been right beside her. Darcy gulped as she looked from Bucky at her right to Jane at her left, the most uncertain than she had been in recent memory.

Her uncertainty, however, was in vain.

“We’ll stay. Bucky needs help and maybe I can help the scribes here. Asgard has more resources than I could get my hands on on Earth,” Jane said casually before plopping a glowing fruit into her mouth.

Thor smiled, nodding thoughtfully before tucking back into his meal as well, happily munching away.

Darcy felt like she was in an episode of the Twilight Zone.

“What?” she croaked, bulging eyes locked on Jane.

Jane frowned at her. “What what?”

“You’re going to…” Darcy shook her head, “You aren’t going back? You’re staying with us?”

“Yes?” Jane was now squinting apprehensively, “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because Earth is about to be Ground Zero! You always go to Ground Zero!” Darcy exclaimed.

“No, I don’t!” Jane had the gall to look mildly offended, but was careful to ignore Thor’s scoff, “I go where I am needed, where I’m most useful! That’s here with you!”

Darcy didn’t miss the heavy glare Jane levelled at an obliviously eating Bucky.

\--------------------------------------

Thor had left that same day, and the three of them settled into a careful routine. Jane obnoxiously woke them up every morning with a dedicated perkiness that Darcy had absolutely never seen before in her best friend but had not had an opportunity to question her about. While Bucky and Darcy spent their mornings with the healers having yet more tests done, Jane found a niche with the scribes, unexpectedly overcome with how readily they welcomed her once she had proven that she could learn quickly. Darcy and Bucky roamed free in the afternoons. The day after Thor’s departure, they found Sif practicing her sword work in a garden, leading to quality bonding between Bucky and the Asgardian on their preferred weaponry. Sif was a good companion for Bucky, steady and, having gone through war herself, able to relate to some of the pain in Bucky’s soul. While Sif and Bucky occasionally did their warrior quality time, Volstagg and Darcy ran wild. One day they’d taken the kitchen hostage, much to Odin’s disapproval, and another Darcy had taught Volstagg’s kids every viral dance she knew while her iPhone played loudly from her hands. Dinner, after Darcy broke Jane away from her work with the scribes, was eaten together on the same veranda the trio had claimed as their own.

Darcy also spent a fair amount of time at Frigga’s side. Odin was there more often than not, leaving Darcy to wonder when the All-Father slept, if he ever did. He’d asked her only once to tell him if Frigga was marked for death.

She’d said it was unclear and left it at that.

There weren’t words to explain anyway, how Frigga’s glow, that natural glow that all Asgardian’s had to Darcy, came in and out of focus with an alarming frequency and no discernible pattern. No way to explain without messing with Odin’s expectations that Death still had not made up its mind whether to take the Queen or not. It wouldn’t do to let hope swell when the fight was Frigga’s and Frigga’s alone.

Over a month after Thor’s departure, Jane was making herself at home on their bed, as was her custom in the morning, when a guard knocked on the door.

“Might as well come in,” Darcy called then grumbled to herself, “Because no one is getting anymore sleep in here.”

The guard opened the door but intentionally did not enter, standing at attention just outside. “Odin requests an audience with your highness, Princess Darcy,” the guard said, head bowed respectfully. It had been something to get used to, but at least Darcy didn’t giggle like a school girl every time someone called her princess.

“Okay,” she yawned, sitting up and rubbing her face, “I’ll meet him after breakfast.”

“With all due respect, your highness,” the guard countered, head still bowed, “Odin requests your presence immediately. He said it was most urgent.”

Darcy frowned at that.

“Go see what he wants,” Jane piped up, “Bucky and I can handle eating breakfast on our own. Can’t we, Bucky?”

Bucky tilted his head in acquiescence, but warning bells were going off in Darcy’s mind. Jane had been civil to Bucky, but the weird looks and thinly veiled comments had continued. Darcy had been meaning to corner Jane for an explanation, but between Jane’s work and Bucky, there hadn’t seemed like a good time.

“Hey, go,” Bucky pushed, maybe sensing her turmoil, “We’ll be fine on our own for a bit. We’ll save you some breakfast.”

Knowing there wasn’t a real reason to ignore the All-Father’s summons, Darcy got dressed and left, tossing one more worried glance over her shoulder as she left.

\--------------------------------------

She found Odin in Frigga’s room, keeping his usual watch at her side. As soon as she entered, he turned to face her.

“Ah, there you are, Princess. I am sorry for the hour, but I am afraid this is something of a time sensitive event.”

Eying the slumbering queen cautiously, Darcy asked, “What did you need me for?”

Odin smiled and sat back down, patting the seat next to him.

“That is something that I can answer in a minute. First, I want you to know, despite what the next moments may bring, I do not wish you harm or pain in any way. I also hope that you won’t feel… betrayed, I suppose, by my actions. It would do to remember that I am a king and have to put my responsibilities ahead of my personal feelings or attachments.”

“Gotta admit, All-Father, I do not like the sound of this so far.” In point of fact, Darcy was beyond nerves and into full fledged anxious apprehension at Odin’s disclaimers.

“Yes,” Odin said, stroking his beard, “Perhaps I should simply allow her to explain.”

“Her?” Darcy asked, stomach dropping, “Do you mean… Frigga? Because I told you before, she isn’t here.”

Odin laid a steady hand on Darcy’s shoulder. “No, not Frigga, young one. I am sorry, I can see my words have only made you distressed when I meant to cushion what’s to come. No matter, there is no more time to waste. You must go to the Dead World, MSS, as you call it. Go there now.”

Darcy did not disappear immediately, too confused and unsure with Odin’s odd behavior.

He lifted her chin so he could look at her directly.

“Trust me, Princess, you must go there, now,” Odin ordered, voice calm and smooth.

So Darcy removed his hands and hummed.

\--------------------------------------

The mists of MSS had been reassuring to Darcy for many years now, and this time was now different. She let the cold wash over her and wash away any of the anxiety Odin has caused.

She was so relaxed that the dainty clearing of a throat behind her nearly gave her a heart attack.

If the sound hadn’t, the face she found when she spun around would have.

Because there, standing in MSS, body shining with the translucency that only the dead have and smiling hugely through her tears, was Diane Lewis.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys!! A couple of long awaited scenes in this chapter, and what is probably the most awaited scene (going off of comments) either in the next chapter or the one after that. Excitingggg!
> 
> Also, editing was minimal on this sucker. Like always, I'll go back later and fix anything glaring, but please tell me if you spot anything wrong. I always appreciate that!

“Mom?”

Darcy couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t _think_.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Diane choked, raising a hand to cup Darcy’s face, “Oh, my girl.”

Darcy threw herself into her mother’s embrace, not caring that the arms that caught her were frozen nor that the flesh that should have been soft and yielding was instead a touch too hard.

No, all Darcy cared about was that her mom smelled exactly the same and that the hand combing through her hair was the same one to have done it a million times before.

“Mom,” Darcy sobbed.

\-------------------------------

Not for the first time, Bucky wondered how such a small person could be so intimidating. He could overpower Jane, obviously, but the chance that she would take him with her was better than he liked.

There was a familiarity about Jane’s manic genius, an imprint of a brash voice booming from a mustached face, that evoked the same feeling of uneasy awe in Bucky. Frustratingly, the memories were still fuzzy, out of reach. The healers had been cautious about starting any treatment, worried that the wrong move could erase his memories entirely. Spearing another sausage with more aggression than was needed, Bucky recalled the well meaning pity in Eir’s eyes as she described the barbaric tactics HYDRA had used to keep their weapon pliable.

Chemicals, crudely and primitively applied in Eir’s view, were used to suppress his neurons, followed by enough electricity to melt a regular man’s brain to wipe away any trace of James Buchanan Barnes. Eir had said that it was beyond remarkable that he as able to remember anything without medical intervention. Darcy, bless her, had chirped that he was stupidly strong and crazy stubborn. That HYDRA had been no match.

How he wished his girl was right.

“So,” Jane interrupted his musings, “Bucky.”

Pausing his chewing, he looked around the empty patio, silently asking ‘who else?’

Jane narrowed her eyes and straightened in her seat.

Bucky swallowed nervously.

“Before we start this, I want you to know that I do feel for you. I think that you have been through terrible things, things that no one should ever have to go through. I think that what happened was not your fault, and I think you are incredibly brave to be going after answers like you are.”

Bucky felt sweat building on his brow.

“With that out of the way,” Jane wiped at her mouth daintily with her napkin, carefully laying down and folding her hands on the table before continuing, “We begin.”

Bucky tried to swallow again but found his mouth too dry. “Begin?” he asked hoarsely, not daring to break eye contact.

Jane calmly nodded. “Yeah. We’ll start with you telling me what you’re doing with Darcy.”

“I,” he tried before an emotion other than fear and anxiety bubbled forth, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.” Bucky clenched his metal fist, not caring that Jane would hear the mechanics of his arm whir under the strain. In fact, he would like that, like scaring her back because how dare she.

“Bucky,” Jane called, but he was too busy letting his anger take over.

How dare she try to take Darcy away from him?

A delicate hand on his fist, his sensors barely picking up the soft touch, pulled him back from his spiraling thoughts. Bucky was horrified to find the knife he’d been using on his breakfast now being brandished like…

He didn’t remember picking it up.

“Bucky,” Jane called again, her tone far kinder than he deserved and hand still resting gently on his fist and seemingly not caring about the knife within it.

“Oh, God,” he moaned, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know…”

“Hey, I could have had a better lead in,” Jane said. She pulled the knife from his slack grasp. “I’ve been trying to decide how to approach the subject for weeks now.”

“I think I have to take the blame for this one, Dr. Foster,” Bucky whispered.

“It’s Jane. You know that,” she sighed, “Look, all of what I said before still stands. But while none of the last 70 years is your fault, I still worry about the lasting effects.”

Effects like the minutes before. He appreciated that she didn’t say it out loud.

Jane continued. “You’re not stable. You’re better than you were, absolutely, and improving, but the fact of the matter is that yours isn’t the sort of trauma that magically goes away overnight. Darcy is my best friend. More than that, she’s my family. We’ve been each other’s family for a long time, and there will never be a time where I don’t love her with all of my heart. That means that I am always going to worry and look out for her. Just like she does for me.”

Like all of his goddamn memories, Bucky could only feel vague familiarity, but something about how Jane described her and Darcy’s friendship… He knew about family. Had had it before.

With Steve.

“I get that,” Bucky said, moving his hand off the table at last, leaning back in his chair away from Jane, “You don’t want me with Darcy.”

She leaned back, too, and folded her arms. Peering shrewdly down her nose at him, she said “Actually, that’s not exactly true. I want Darcy safe, yes, but I also want her happy. Happy means whatever she chooses.”

That was enough to make Bucky nonplussed. “What?”

“Darcy is a grown woman. She makes her own decisions, and it’s pretty obvious that she has chosen you. I need to know that you are going to choose her, too.”

He opened his mouth to answer, but Jane cut him off before he could get the words out.

“Choosing her doesn’t only mean wanting her,” she said, cocking her head, “It means working to be the best partner you can be, to working together to be the best versions of yourselves that you can be. I need to know that you can do that. That you can try your best and keep trying every day.”

Bucky took a deep breath, letting his conviction shine through.

“I can,” he said, “I will.”

\-------------------------------

Darcy sobbed for what felt like forever.

Diane held her through all of it.

Finally, she wrangled herself to the occasional hiccup. “Mom?” she asked, “How are you here?”

With eyes as wet as her daughter’s, Diane smiled sadly. “Mephisto released my soul.”

Hope, bright and sharp, burst in her heart.

“He released you? So you can,” but her mom interrupted her.

“I’m still dead, sweetheart. Not even Mephisto can raise the dead.”

Hope burned when it died, but Darcy didn’t want to waste these moments on that pain.

“So what, dear old dad released you? Released you from what? Why?” She rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, not willing to give up Diane’s embrace and equally unable to process the fact that this would be the last one she would ever receive from her mother.

Oh, Frigga, this was the last hug that she would ever get from her mom.

Diane, like so many times before, seemed to know exactly what her daughter was thinking.

“I’ve got you,” she spoke into Darcy’s hair, “Just because I’m gone, it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you. That I’m not so proud of the woman you’ve become. I’ve heard about the things you’ve done. Hell was rife with stories of what you’d done: how you helped save the world, how you fought ancient evils and saved monarchs,” Darcy felt Diane’s tears dribble onto her cheek, “You are so strong, my beautiful girl. You were worth every choice I made. I would do everything again, everything exactly the same, because it got me you.”

“Mom,” Darcy whimpered, “Don’t go. Please, please stay. Stay here with me! I need you, please, I need you… It’s been so hard without you!”

“I want to stay more than anything,” Diane shuddered, “But I can’t. I’ve already stayed too long, and I still have to tell you what I was meant to tell you.”

“No,” Darcy clutched at her mother tighter, but even she could feel the ice that was calling to Diane.

“Listen to me, sweetheart, this is important,” Diane pulled away, “Mephisto released me from hell, and I’ll get to rest now. With grandma and everyone else who died a normal death. I’ll be fine now, I promise.”

“Why’d he do that?” Darcy sniffled, trying to keep ahold of Diane, but her mother gently peeled Darcy’s fingers from her.

“Because he knew you wouldn’t listen to him without some goodwill gesture, without the specter of me hanging over you both. But you have to listen to him, Darcy,” Diane shook her head at Darcy’s incredulous look, “You have to! The fate of everyone and everything depends on it.”

“I can’t just…” Darcy spluttered.

“You can, and you will,” Diane gave one last squeeze to Darcy’s hands before stepping back into the swirling mists, “I have to go now. I love you so much. More than anything. You were worth everything,” Diane smiled, tears rolling freely, “Even dying.”

Darcy watched the mists envelope her mother.

“I love you, Mom,” she choked out before Diane disappeared with one last smile.

With an anguished scream, Darcy fell to her knees, oblivious to the shifting world around her. She collapsed onto the floor, unheeding of Odin rush to her side.

She only cried.

\-------------------------------

Bucky had just arrived and greeted Eir when a guard rushing into the room had him positioning himself protectively before the healer.

“I am sorry, Lord Barnes,” the guard huffed, “but it is the Princess, sir.”

Clarity washed over Bucky, a deadly focus that had him stalking towards the guard. The Asgardian took an instinctive step back.

“Where is she?” Bucky growled.

\-------------------------------

Darcy was floating.

She should be more alarmed at not feeling the floor beneath her, but she didn’t have it in her. It was taking all of her to remember how to breathe.

A softly murmured, “I’ve got you,” had her heart pick up, remembering her mom saying that only minutes or was it hours ago. That damn hope had her taking note of her surroundings. She wasn’t floating but being carried, a warm arm cradling her torso while a cold arm held up her legs. Her hope died when she realized it wasn’t her mom with her, but losing this shard of hope was not as painful as the last time.

“Bucky,” she gasped, not able to get much volume while still sobbing.

“Shh, doll, I’ve got you, won’t let nothin’ happen to you,” he soothed, accent back in full force.

Brooklyn had never sounded so good.

Darcy buried her head into his shoulder as he walked them through the palace towards their room. She could feel his heartbeat under her cheek, smell him underneath the Asgardian oils she teased him about when he started using them last week.

Bucky nudged open the door with his foot, kicking it shut with a resounding thud. He laid her down on the bed, but she didn’t let him rise up.

“Stay with me,” Darcy pleaded, “Please.”

Running a finger along her red cheek, he went to settle down on the bed, curling his larger body into hers.

“I’m right here with you,” Bucky promised, “Always.”

\-------------------------------

Darcy’d cried herself to sleep in his arms. Even in slumber, tears slipped out from her closed lids and whimpers escaped her. He couldn’t stop himself from kissing the furrow in her brow and pulling her into him while whispering nonsense to her. It was some consolation that she calmed down from his ministrations.

Bucky still wasn’t sure what had happened. He’d been led into the Queen’s room only to find Darcy bawling in Odin’s lap on the ground. Had all of his attention not been on his girl’s pain, he might have found the picture of the All-Father stiffly patting a weeping woman while his eye spun around the room for someone to help funny. As it was, he’d only had a nod for Odin as he swept Darcy up into his arms, intent on getting her somewhere safe. 

Now, he wished he’d had the presence of mind to ask what Darcy and Odin’s meeting had been about so he could have some clue as to what had caused her reaction.

A muffled voice in the hallway caught his ear. Rolling onto his side, shifting Darcy so she was still cradled safely against him, Bucky heard Jane sending away the guard stationed outside.

With a quiet grunt, Jane heaved the door open. Bucky checked to make sure Darcy was still sleeping soundly as Jane made her way over to them.

“Do you know what happened?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

Jane reached out to brush Darcy’s hair back from where it had fallen over her face, fingers lingering. “She saw her mom,” Jane whispered.

Bucky frowned. “What? Her mom died years ago, Mephisto killed her. Darcy said so.”

“He did,” Jane leaned against the bed, jostling Bucky and thus Darcy. He shot her an unamused glare, so she continued, “Mephisto had taken Diane’s soul, but he released her. Darcy got to see her before she moved on to wherever it is the dead apparently go.”

Another whimper from the girl on his chest broke the conversation. Darcy’s reactions made more sense now, and despite not truly remembering any of his own family, Bucky couldn’t imagine how much seeing the family you thought lost only to lose them immediately all over again hurt.

He dropped another kiss on Darcy’s cheek before turning to Jane.

“I have this, Jane,” he began before she could argue, “I promise I have this.”

Looking torn, Jane ran a hand down Darcy’s sleep warmed arm. “Maybe I should be here, though,” she argued.

“Not tryin’ to chase you out, but this is what you were talking about earlier,” Bucky pointed out, “This is the kind of thing that I need to do to be the best partner for her. I can do that, hold her now, and be here for her when she wakes up. Then we can all have our usual dinner or something. She knows you’re here, and you can be here in two seconds if she needs you.”

Bucky could support Darcy and could help her. He needed to be allowed to do that, the urge as strong as anything he’d felt. It had as much to do with soothing Darcy’s pain as it had to do with realizing this protective streak for those he cared about was an intrinsic part of himself, a part of James Buchanan Barnes. 

He understood what Jane had been talking about earlier, and the more he discovered about himself, the more he was convinced that he could be the partner Darcy needed. He was broken and in pain and dangerous, but Darcy had shown him time and again that she could handle that. Not to mention with Darcy being who she was, she needed someone with teeth.

Huddling her as tightly as he dared while she slept on, Bucky knew he couldn’t lose her, couldn’t lose that trust between them or lose the way that holding her felt like he was holding everything good in the world in his two arms. 

Jane frowned before puffing out a laugh. “I guess I asked for this, huh?” she asked, self-deprecation dripping from her voice. “I’m so used to taking care of her that I kind of hadn’t thought through sharing the privilege.”

Bucky, realizing the faith he was being shown, smiled appreciatively.

With a last squeeze, Jane let go and moved to the door, throwing a smile over her shoulder as she disappeared from view.

Darcy sniffled at the heavy thud of the door shutting, annoyance crossing her features rather than despair for the first time tonight. Bucky pulled another fur over them, burying his face against her hair and deciding to finally nap a bit himself. 

He needed to be well rested after all because he had a mission when he woke, one that he chose and one that he knew would be his for a long time to come: 

Partner to his best girl.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S BEEN A MILLION YEARS, but I promise I have no plans on abandoning this story!!!
> 
> Also, I'm fudging the MCU timeline a bit because it works better for this story.
> 
> Ten points to whoever gets the Buffy reference. As always, please tell me about any typos that you may find!

Her brain was trying its damndest to push through her eye sockets. At least, that’s what the unforgiving pounding in her head felt like, but maybe that was the dramatic flair her mom always used to warn her about.

Fuck.

Her mom. 

Darcy hadn’t even opened her eyes yet, but she could already feel them filling with tears. 

This wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t blubber anymore about shit she couldn’t change. Hell, if anything, Darcy had gotten the thing most desired by anyone who had abruptly lost a loved one: the chance to say goodbye. She just had to keep telling herself that she was lucky. Repeat it often enough, and maybe she’d believe it.

A grumbling snore from above her had Darcy finally opening her eyes, steadfastly ignoring any moisture that happened to roll down her cheeks. Angling her head, she looked up the warm chest under her to find Bucky, softly breathing into the ends of her long hair, still asleep. It was rare for her to wake before him. They’d been in Asgard for a couple of months, sharing a bed throughout all that time, and though she awoke every morning tangled up in Bucky, she could count on one finger the number of times she’d woken first.

Which was a shame because, Jesus, was Bucky pretty while he slept. He was pretty when he was awake, obviously, but that he trusted her enough to sleep in her presence after all he’d experienced? That lent something to the overall picture that both broke and bolstered her heart.

Also, his bedhead was nine kinds of hot.

“You know,” Bucky mumbled, “You’re maybe the only person who’s seen the Winter Soldier sleeping and lived to tell the tale.”

Chuckling lightly, Darcy shifted up, bringing her body flush with his by hitching a knee over him, getting comfortable as she propped her chin and folded hands above his heart. She didn’t miss the beat that heart skipped nor the way his metal hand came to rest on her bent leg, pulling it slightly tighter around his hip. For the first time since waking up, the pounding was not in her head. It was base, to be sure, but as long Bucky didn’t mind, Darcy was okay with their habit of using the tension between them as a distraction. Judging by how hard his hand was gripping her thigh, Bucky was more than okay with the practice.

“You say the most romantic things,” she sighed, moving to tuck his hair behind an ear.

“Oh, I’ve got moves,” Bucky said, and then surprised her by pulling her thigh over a bulge that Darcy had gotten very good at pretending not to notice. At the sudden escalation, a small beat of nerves made itself known in Darcy’s gut, but Bucky was rolling her off him a moment later and pressing a sweet kiss to her forehead.

“But now’s not the time for those moves,” he continued, sitting up and discreetly moving a fur over them, hiding anything lower than his navel from view, “This is maybe a dumb question, but how are you feeling?”

Darcy was still in a bit of a stupor from how far Bucky was apparently alright with taking their game and the following implications so answered with a curt, “Fine.”

Bucky frowned and pulled her up to lean against the headboard, facing him. “Fine?” he repeated dubiously.

“Hm?” Darcy asked, wondering exactly what else Bucky would be okay with doing. Bucky seemed to realize the source of her distraction, likely due to the way Darcy was now stroking his pectorals.

Laughing somewhat smugly, he rolled his eyes and stilled her wandering hand. “Come on, Darce, my eyes are up here. I’m trying to be serious.”

Chastened, Darcy focused on his face, but if he expected her to be embarrassed, then he had another thing coming. “Trying to be serious? Sure, trying to be seriously attractive and distracting.”

The slow grin that lit up Bucky’s face only further muddled her senses.

“I don’t have to try for that, doll,” Bucky drawled, cocking a brow at her.

Luckily, that broke the spell, and Darcy couldn’t help the punch she gave his shoulder. For his part, Bucky didn’t stop grinning as he chimed, “There’s my girl.”

Darcy returned his grin and realized quickly that, despite the sadness she still felt over her mom, she hadn’t been lying earlier. She was fine. Or rather, she would be fine, she thought as she snuggled back into Bucky. He accepted her embrace like he always did, immediately and with his whole body, and whispered into her neck, “You know you can talk to me, right? It doesn’t always have to be you being strong. That’s not fair, and I wouldn’t want that. I can be strong, too, especially if I’m being strong for you.”

“I know,” Darcy whispered back, respecting the fragility of the moment, “I know I can talk to you and that you can be strong, Bucky.”

“Jane told me that you saw your mom.”

Darcy burrowed deeper into his arms before answering. 

“Mephisto released her soul,” Bucky made to interrupt, but she kept on over him, sure that the only way she’d get this out was all at once, “Her soul had been in Hell. That’s what happens to the souls Mephisto collects, they go to his Hell world… Odin told me once that it’s not like the Christian Hell, but it still can’t be pleasant, right? I mean, it’s Hell, and that’s where my mom’s been for…” Darcy choked on a sob.

Bucky stroked her hair, still holding her tight, but seemed to understand that she didn’t want him to speak until she was done.

“She seemed okay, though, exactly like I remember her except she was dead. Mom told me… She said she was proud of me, that she’d heard about the things I’d done, and was proud of me. She said that… that she would… she’d do it all again! She’d make the deal and give her soul up and die all again!” Darcy was hysterical, and as much as she hated it, she knew she could fall apart here with Bucky in their bed. He’d hold her together.

And that’s exactly what he did.

“She’d do it again because she got you out of it,” Bucky soothed, wiping the tears from her hot cheeks, “She’d do it again because she got you, Darce.”

\-----------------------------

Jane was in the deepest level of the palace’s archives, tracking down a translation of an account from an experiment done with the Tesseract by some of the earliest Asgardians, when a strong hand on her back startled her. In Jane’s defense, her volatility was well known throughout Asgard, with many a joke about the raging Odinson having met his match filling the alehouses of Asgard, and so her reaction to a hand suddenly touching her in the dark should be excused.

As the All-Father rubbed his cheek from where she had landed a solid right hook in her surprise, Jane distantly thought that she was three for four in smacking Asgard’s royal family. Most people would be quaking in their stylish yet affordable boots after having punched the King of Asgard, but Jane, well, Jane was not most people.

“I’d say I was sorry, but you shouldn’t sneak up on women who think they’re alone, your highness,” Jane said, moving to mark her place on her scroll before giving Odin her full attention.

“Quite true,” Odin agreed gamely with a spark in his eyes that Jane recognized, having seen it often in Thor’s own blue gaze: amused approval, “I merely wished to know how your work has progressed. The scribes have been giving excellent reports and largely credit your work.”

Whatever Jane had expected Odin to say, it was not that. Aside from his general prejudices against any race other than his own, Thor had also spoken of his father’s opposition to her and Thor’s love. Odin’s seeming disapproval did not bother Jane personally. She’d faced too much disapproval from old white dudes in her life to start letting it bother her now on principle, but she knew it upset Thor. For him, she had tried to be nice and pleasant while on Asgard. Not that Jane thought she was generally unpleasant or rude, but as Darcy lovingly teased her, Jane was not a great socializer. Hearing Odin acknowledge her work, perhaps even compliment it, was both surprising and pleasing.

“The scribes have been really welcoming,” Jane began, “It’s been hard to tear myself away from the archives, truth be told. There’s so much to learn.”

“Thor and Princess Darcy have often commented on your determination and single mindedness in your work. The Princess swore to me there was no beast so fierce as yourself in pursuit of knowledge,” Odin ran a finger along his jaw where her fist had connected minutes before, “I should be happy that only your fist struck me, I suppose.”

“It’s because I was only reading. Had I been doing my own research, I might have taken your other eye,” Jane baited him, curious how far Odin’s good will extended. The scientist in her never could resist a good experiment.

Odin only laughed and began to guide her from her table. “Aye, I am thankful then that I had not already bestowed the opportunity I wished to give you today. I admit to purposefully limiting your resources for these first few months. Given the cautionary tales that I have heard, I thought it best to force you to truly immerse yourself in our existing knowledge before allowing you to pave your own way further.”

Jane frowned as they left the archives entirely, heading towards an unfamiliar portion of the palace. “I don’t understand. You had the scribes hide books from me?”

“No, no, you had access to all of Asgard’s written tomes. More access than most scribes are ever allowed as befits the Crown Prince’s consort. I meant access to a more physical resource…” Odin opted for showing rather than telling here, guiding her through a series of locked doors and passed numerous guards until they were in the belly of a massive vault. With a wave of his staff, a stone wall crawled forward, revealing a small chamber lit by a dancing blue glow. As the chamber became fully visible, Jane let out a gasp.

“The Tesseract.”

\-----------------------------

After twenty minutes, Darcy concluded that Jane wasn’t coming to dinner and served herself some of the heavenly smelling soup, ignoring the bright purple coloring.

“Should we be worried?” Bucky asked, but his concern was clearly only for show because he was quick to help himself to the soup as soon as she’d relinquished the ladle.

“Nah, she’s fine,” Darcy said while she blew on a steaming spoonful, “Just caught up in work, most likely.”

Bucky’s concern did then turn a touch more pointed. “Most likely?”

Moaning at the taste of the soup and doubly regretting having slept through lunch, Darcy waved him off absentmindedly, waiting until she’d taken a few more spoons of her dinner before explaining, “Jane and I’ve been together for years now, and she’s the one who helped me the most in trying to hone my powers or whatever. I’m always aware of her energy. It’s background noise now and totally an involuntary thing. If anything is ever wrong with her, I’m gonna know before anyone, even her,” Darcy paused to gulp some more soup before guiltily adding, “Except for that one time she was kidnapped by HYDRA, but that was only because I was exceptionally drunk at the time.”

Bucky chuckled, and they ate their dinner in comfortable silence, still raw from the afternoon. Darcy had told Bucky everything that had transpired with her mom which had wiped her out both physically and mentally. They’d stayed in bed up right up until dinner, alternately dozing and talking, limiting conversation to palace gossip. Fandral was a favorite topic as Bucky had found an unlikely friend in the Asgardian. Darcy much prefered Sif and Volstagg to Fandral, but Bucky liked Fandral’s stories. A part of her believed it was because Bucky could recognize aspects of his pre-War self in the stories of Fandral charming his way into the hearts of Asgardians or of Fandral talking his way out of some skirmish or another. In the scant days they’d taken to prepare back at the Tower before leaving for Asgard, Darcy had covertly read up on what the history books said about Bucky.

She’d done it covertly because, at the time, she wasn’t sure how the man refusing any and all contact with the only remaining piece of his past, Steve, would take reminders of that past. She later realized that Bucky’s aversion to Steve was because of something more recent and personal and so had little to do with his past life. Coming clean should have been her next move, but Darcy had felt uncharacteristically embarrassed at having read up so much on Bucky. It wasn’t that she was hiding what she had learned, but she was unsure about how to bring it up without making it seem like she wanted him to remember things he might not be able to recall. The last thing she wanted was to pressure him, and thus she kept what she had learned to herself for the time being.

Part of what she had learned was that Bucky Barnes had been quite the flirt in his day. It didn’t surprise her given the lines he fed her when he wasn’t thinking, when he was acting on instinct. Darcy most assuredly was not worrying that Bucky was trying to live vicariously through Fandral’s conquests; she’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid to miss the affection and the loyalty Bucky showed her. Even if they hadn’t officially begun any kind of relationship, they both knew there was something there. They’d talked round it while they tackled more pressing issues, but neither of them doubted it was there. So Darcy thought Bucky liked Fandral’s stories because without memories of his own, the stories were the closest explanations he could find for the motives behind his own actions and feelings. Something familiar enough to give him some context.

Bucky interrupted Darcy’s musings, “Nothing against Jane, but I could probably help you with your powers some, too.”

“You’re sweet, but I think I’m good. As Dragon Ball Z as it is to say, I feel like I got the full gist of my powers once I tapped into my full demon form and went all super saiyan.”

“What you do with a dragon’s balls is your own business,” Bucky glided on by yet another reference he didn’t understand, “I get that you know what powers you have now in a general sense, but I can still help you with how you use those powers.”

There was a more assertive quality to his voice that Darcy was noticing more and more as time went by. As frustrated as Bucky might be with what he saw as little progress, he actually moved farther and farther from the emotionless automaton that was the Winter Soldier under HYDRA control with every day, and she was loving seeing new traits and quirks emerge in him. However, this was one trait she didn’t want to indulge in the present situation. She’d had enough powers testing with her Science Ladies to last a lifetime.

“I really think I’m good, Buckaroo,” Darcy evaded, reaching across him to grab a roll so that she could mop up the last dregs of soup in her bowl. Before she could reach the bread, though, she was being pulled from her chair and the room became a blur of motion until she was resting belly down on the ground, hands locked in a metal fist behind her back and Bucky’s flesh hand pressing into her throat hard enough to burn. With a start, she realized the hand at her throat was pinning her so that she couldn’t get any air and so could not scream or hum.

Bucky released her quickly and rolled back to settle on his haunches. He didn’t even have the decency to pretend to be out of breath from his display.

Rubbing her neck even though she knew she was completely fine, she glared at him. “What the hell?”

“You couldn’t have escaped that before I broke your neck. You rely too much on the assumption you’re going to be able to make some noise and disappear away from danger,” Bucky shrugged, “You think that your powers as you understand them are enough to save you. I just showed you how deadly that assumption can be.”

Darcy used the chair to leverage herself up, irritated at both his actions and what he was implying. “I can take care of myself! Something you should know considering I beat you twice.”

“Wouldn’t have happened the second time if I hadn’t been wiped, doll,” Bucky said calmly, staying seated.

“Oh, you think so?” Darcy could feel her eyes going a little black with anger, and she wasn’t even sure why. Bucky was only trying to help, but she couldn’t stop the rage building within her. “I’ve kept myself alive this long! Against flaming metal deathbots and space elves and gods and, oh yeah, cyborg assassins bent on killing me!” she screeched, regretting how shrill her voice sounded.

A second later, she regretted having grouped Bucky in with her enemies even more.

“No, I didn’t mean…” she began, eyes skittering down, “I’m sorry, you’re trying to help me. I don’t know…”

Bucky, who hadn’t so much as twitched when she was yelling at him, jumped up at the wobbling way her sentence trailed off, reaching for her before she could embarrassingly cry for the millionth time that day.

“Hey, doll, it’s alright. You’re not mad at me, I know that. I’m just the safest place for you to direct your anger right now, that’s all.”

Shame burned bright in her at that realization, that she’d reflexively used Bucky as an emotional punching bag because the person she really wanted to punch was somewhere off gallivanting in some brimstone and hellfire.

“I’m sorry. I won’t let that happen again,” she promised, “I didn’t realize, but I will next time.”

“It’s been a day so don’t beat yourself up too much. I’m tougher than I look,” Bucky cajoled, drawing a watery giggle from her because if Bucky were any tougher than he looked, then he’d be nigh-invulnerable.

Wanting to give him more than platitudes and also realizing his point from earlier was valid, Darcy sighed, “You’re right. I need more help, especially if things are only going to get crazier once my Deadbeat Dad shows up. I’d love for you to help me.”

“I’ll go easy on you,” Bucky said, “To start.”

\-----------------------------

The next morning, Jane dragged herself to breakfast in yesterday’s clothes, prompting a full body sigh from her assistant.

“Clearly, I should have popped into the archives for you last night,” Darcy said, “And here I thought you were getting better about tucking yourself in at night.”

Jane stuck her tongue out at Darcy before zeroing in on the coffee that Thor had long ago made a staple import from Earth into Asgard. “Joke’s on you because you wouldn’t have been able to find me in the Archives.”

“It’s a big ass library, sure, but I would have found you eventually. I’d have followed whatever trail of destruction your research had left straight to you.”

Jane smiled at Bucky after he pulled out her chair and daintily sat down. Darcy blinked at the exchange, curious as to what had shifted the two from polite tolerance to friendly overtures, while Jane responded.

“I don’t leave trails of destruction wherever I work,” she muttered halfheartedly into her giant mug of coffee.

“Not going to bother arguing that one because your record speaks for itself. You’re an adorable and terrifying Tasmanian Devil of Science.”

Jane flipped her off, almost spilling her precious coffee because she really needed two hands to safely maneuver it. The mug was ostensibly Thor’s, but Jane had long ago swiped it despite the obvious disparity between her human metabolism and his Asgardian one.

“Whatever,” Jane clamped both hands on the mug before disaster struck, “I mean that I’m not working in the Archives anymore. New project.”

“Oh?” Darcy asked, intrigued. Bucky continued with his usual habit of stuffing his mouth with breakfast sausage rather than engaging in the surrounding conversation. He was usually chattier during lunch and dinner, but Frigga help the poor soul who interrupted his morning meal.

“Tell you all about it later once I have a better handle on it,” Jane tilted her head at Darcy, narrowing her eyes, “You look good.”

“I’d usually be insulted at the tone of surprise, but given the day I had yesterday, I’ll give you a pass, Janie-pants. I’m okay.”

Jane squinted at her, clearly skeptical.

“Really,” Darcy reassured her, leaning over to playfully butt her friend’s shoulder with her own, “I was really torn up yesterday, and it still sucks balls hard, but I’m really okay.”

Jane squinted harder, but then turned to face Bucky and nodded approvingly.

“Good job, Wiener Soldier.”

Bucky, who at that moment had been stuffing two sausages at once into his mouth, choked on said wieners at the nickname. Darcy perked up in her seat, face beginning to glow with delight much to Bucky’s chagrin. Swallowing quickly, he bit out a hard, “No.”

“Jane, you brilliant, genius angel of a human!” Darcy exclaimed, every tooth showing in a wide grin, “Wiener Soldier!”

“No,” Bucky tried again, face going white, “This is not happening. That name is not happening.”

While Darcy lost herself to body-wracking laughter, muttering ‘wiener soldier’ to herself over and over, Jane pat Bucky on the arm.

“Welcome to our weird little family, Wiener Soldier,” she said before stealing a sausage from his plate and taking a large, self-satisfied bite.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a totally new kind of story for me, so please, please let me know what y'all think!
> 
> I'm iamkatebishop on Tumblr, come and say hello!


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